I'm using GWT 2.1.1 and client-server communication using the AsyncService (not RequestFactory). I have an object that returns a "fund" object. The fund has a reference to a "distributor" object which itself has a collection of "fund" objects.
In one scenario, I'm returning from the server, fund "foo" who's distributor reference has "foo", "bar" and "joe" funds. This is a common business scenario. When deserializing on the client side, I get an error because the "foo" reference in the collection of funds in distributor ends up with no values populated. In particular, the fund-id (string) is not populated and this is used in the hashcode implementation. During client-side deserialization, "bar" and "joe" funds get deserialized properly, but foo fails, i.e., gets deserialized with only a few properties.
What is going on here is that when "foo" is getting deserialized, it has a few properties deserialized and then gwt attempts to deserialize the distributor. Foo's fund-id property has not yet been deserialized. So when distributor's collection of funds is being deserialized, and "foo" in encountered, the deserializer gives back a reference to the currently in-deserializing "foo" which doesn't have the fund-id. So when GWT attempts to add it to the Set (HashSet) in distributor, the hashcode implementation fails.
So my question is, in such cases, is there any way to force GWT to serialize certain properties (in this case fund-id which hashCode depends on) first?
Found that this is actually a known issue. For anyone else who runs across this, and finds this question through a search:
http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/issues/detail?id=3577
I'll post info about how to implement a custom serializer once I read up on it so folks have a fuller picture. I invite others to do so as well.