[ome-devel] Query semantically typed objects for has-many relations?

[Zachary Pincus]

Hello folks,

If I may ask a (possibly uninformed) question, I'd like to know whether 
it is possible to query semantically-typed objects to find out their 
has-many relations.

I ask because calling $object->getHasMany() on any semantically-typed 
object never seems to return anything, whereas calling the same on a 
base data object works as advertised.

The core types have their has-many fields clearly defined with 
__PACKAGE__->hasMany(...) style calls. Is there a similar "call" in the 
OME XML to alert OME to the fact that a semantically-typed object 
participates in a has-many relation? Or does/should OME automatically 
detect this on loading a new semantic type?

This is all apropos of working with the remote framework. I can't get 
the remote framework to return the has-many fields for 
semantically-typed data objects, even though the java client and the 
omejava code creation tool implicitly presume this ability. (Leading to 
several bugs with the java remote framework which I have reported on 
the bugtracker.) That is (for example), it's easy to get the remote 
framework to package Image objects with a list of all associated Pixels 
objects -- Images are a base type, and support getting lists of 
has-many attributes. However, retrieving a Group object packaged with 
all the appropriate Experimenters doesn't appear to be possible (even 
though the Java client code claims to support this).


(One last question: are the java client library and the OME::Remote 
framework still under active development?)

Thanks,

Zach Pincus

Department of Biochemistry and Program in Biomedical Informatics
Stanford University School of Medicine