VOSS 3.1

VirtualDictionarySet (a virtualized subclass of DictionarySet) is the workhorse collection class to use for aggregation of objects in a VOSS database. Typically, all the objects in a DictionarySet will be of the same class (e.g. Employee, Department, Project, Order, Invoice etc), but not necessarily.

DictionarySet allows its elements to be indexed by any number of single-valued and/or multi-valued key-selector unary messages (e.g. #employeeNumber (single-valued), #lastName (multi-valued), #deptNumber (a foreign key in Employees), #deptNumber (primary key in Departments) etc), as required by the application.

Complex queries are built by sending messages such as <#for: #lastName equals: ‘Smith’>  to the DictionarySet, to which the DictionarySet returns a set of its elements meeting that criterion. There is an example of a complex query here.

The tip here, in the interests of efficiency,  is not to “change the class” of the returned partial query sets (e.g. #asOrderedCollection) until after all the intersections and/or unions of partial query sets have been done to build the complex query - and even then there is rarely any need to do this.

VirtualDictionarySet>>for:equals: returns a VOLogicalOrderedIdentitySet of virtual objects, which compares logical identity of the virtual objects it contains (and is adding) by comparing the object’s #voManager identity and its integer object #id, both of which are in the in the object’s proxy VORef (which is what is actually in the set), and therefore no #= message need be expensively forwarded to the instantiated object in the cache in the voManager. 
 
Moreover, VOLogicalOrderedIdentitySet is hashed (on #id in the VORef), and needs to compare identity only when probing hash collisions. Therefore it executes #includes: much faster than OrderedCollection or other non-hashed collections, which must compare equality for each of the entire collection when looking for an absent object, and, on average, half the collection for each present object, forwarding #= to the instantiated object each time.

It is therefore very much faster when constructing complex queries to do all union and intersection of the partial query sets using the VOLogicalOrderedIdentitySets as returned by the partial query components.
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