Durable Entities ToDos

[davidmrdavid]

Tracking ticket to investigate leftover ToDos in the Durable Entities PR here: #184

• Is isNewlyConstructed actually used?

• What are the semantics of destructOnExit?

[sebastianburckhardt]

As a general rule, the semantics of batched operations must always the same as if the operations were not batched.

Thus, destruct on exit deletes the state after the operation that specifies it. If the next operation after that accesses the state again, it would be recreated, just as if that operation were the first operation on a new entity.

[davidmrdavid]

@sebastianburckhardt: Thanks! Makes sense, and I think that answers my question about destructOnExit. What about isNewlyConstructed, is that a flag that should be used at all for implementing an Entity's behavior?

[sebastianburckhardt]

The flag is there so that an operation can detect whether it is the first operation ever to execute on that state, in case there is some special initialization required. For example, if the initial entity state should be read from an external source.

I haven't looked at the Python API so I am not sure if it makes sense there also.