The DatabaseObjectHelper class contains some convienience methods to help
access to the database services. These are described below:
- getOrCreate
: Use when you're not sure if your object is already in the database. It will
either retrieve your object or create a new one. Checks to see if the
identifier provided is already in the database. If it is, return the
associated object. If it isn't, then create the object with the provided
identifier and return it. If no identifier was provided, then create a fresh
identifier and return the new object. This does NOT create any object in the
database.
- assignAndSave
: Should only be used if you want to re-assign an identifier to an already
existing object and then load that object into the database, as it does NOT
create a new object but assumes a pre-existing one. You may pass a Person
object as the person who should be marked as the audit trail owner. This
person must already be loaded in the database, if used. However, the method
will deal properly with null values in the person argument, therefore if you
don't have person information, just pass a null value for that argument and
the audit information will be created without it.
