Updating or Deleting a property from an entity by name (Java)

[caioiglesias]

On Google Cloud Dataflow when adding a property to an entity the process would be

Entity oldEntity = c.element();
Entity.Builder entityBuilder = Entity.newBuilder(oldEntity);
entityBuilder.addProperty(
        DatastoreHelper.makeProperty("newProperty",
                DatastoreHelper.makeValue("Value")
        )
);
  c.output(entityBuilder.build());

The only foreign elements from the datastore API here are:

• DatastoreHelper: returning a property field and a value
• c: getting the entity as an input and then outputting another entity.

Shouldn't there be a method to remove, get or set a property by name instead of an int? Adding an existing property produces no error, but saving it to the Datastore service produces an error complaining about a duplicate name for a property.

[eddavisson]

In the v1beta3 API, the properties are exposed as an actual map, so this will get a lot simpler once Google Cloud Dataflow is updated to use that API version.

In the meantime, once option is to use DatastoreHelper.getPropertyMap to get the properties as a Map<String, Value>, modify that map as needed, clear the original property list on the Entity.Builder, and then add back the values from the map.

[caioiglesias]

That's what I'm currently doing, but I felt like it could use some improvements. I'll keep following the Dataflow/Beam project as they switch to v1beta3. Thank you very much for the prompt reply @eddavisson .