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Marek Szuba authored
Properties of specific types of mature RNA products such as microRNAs are stored in the database as attributes (so that we needn't add type-specific columns to the rnaproduct table) but have shorthand accessors such as MicroRNA::arm() backed by cache member variables in the API (for convenience and speed). In order for this to work properly we have to push possible changes to the cache variables back to attributes before they are stored in the database - which is what this method does. The synchronisation code itself is generic and has been implemented in the superclass. Specialisation is handled by class-specific mappings between member names and respective Attribute codes, provided by RNAProductTypeMapper. Limitations: - at present there can only be either zero or one target attribute; having many attributes with the same code results in an exception because we do not know which one(s) to update. In the future we might have to extend the mapping syntax to support multiple attributes, for now however (i.e. for microRNA arms) we do not need it; - chances are things will break badly if we fetch a MicroRNA object from the database, change the arm and push it back. Right now this is not a problem because RNAProducts do not support database updates at all, then again should we want to support them we will have to check how AttributeAdaptor handles updates of existing objects (as well as the same for DBEntryAdaptor, as a matter of fact).
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