Oracle C++ Call Interface Programmer's Guide

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Overview of Navigational Access
The following example shows how to modify the state attribute of the object, addr:
addr_ref->setState("PA");
As explained earlier, the first invocation of the operator -> on Ref loads the
object if not already in the object cache.
Marking Objects and Flushing Changes
In the example in the previous section, an attribute of an object was changed. At
this point, however, that change exists only in the client-side cache. The application
must take specific steps to ensure that the change is written to the database.
Marking an Object as Modified (Dirty)
The first step is to indicate that the object has been modified. This is done by calling
the markModified method on the object (derived method of PObject). This
method marks the object as dirty (modified).
Continuing the previous example, after object attributes are manipulated, the object
referred to by addr_ref can be marked dirty as follows:
addr_ref->markModified()
Recording Changes in the Database
Objects that have had their dirty flag set must be flushed to the database server for
the changes to be recorded in the database. This can be done in three ways:
■ Flush a single object marked dirty by calling the method flush, a derived
method of PObject.
■ Flush the entire object cache using the Connection::flushCache method. In
this case, OCCI traverses the dirty list maintained by the object cache and
flushes all the dirty objects.
■ Commit a transaction by calling the Connection::commit method. Doing so
also traverses the dirty list and flushes the objects to the database server. The
dirty list includes newly created persistent objects.
Object Programming 3-17