[elephant-devel] Re: recreate-instance-using-class

[Alex Mizrahi]

 IE>>> our learning.  My guess is that getting all this right can best be
 IE>>> accomplished by rationally designing all the functionality from
 IE>>> scratch, and rewrite the persistence protocol as necessary to
 IE>>> accommodate the new design.
 ??>>
 ??>> the way it was working before "the patches" seemed to be more-or-less
 ??>> consistent to me.
 ??>> at least it wasn't that confusing..

 IE> I think the problem is that initialize-instance gets called each time,
 IE> so if you define an :after method on it for object creation time - for
 IE> example that computes a specific slot value, then that code gets rerun
 IE> on object re-initialization and clobbers any updates that happened in
 IE> the meantime.

what's wrong with having such structure of initialize-instance:

(defmethod initialize-instance :after ((instance some-class) &rest initargs 
&allow-other-keys)
   (unless (member :from-oid initargs)
    ;; modify persistent slots for the first time
    )
   ;; do "transient" initialization here
   )

?

 IE> Actually this would happen as expected.  Objects loaded into memory
 IE> would automatically get the initforms of the transient fields, unless
 IE> they wanted to override the default by calling the special generic
 IE> function.

i thought people might be doing all sorts of funny stuff in their 
initialize-instances -- additional initialization unrelated to instance 
slots, validation, writing to logs etc.
and they can be surprised that once they make class elephant-persistent and 
it's loaded from DB, their stuff is not executed anymore.