Implementing the comments: Writing a comment as a supercolumn

So far we have looked at simple column families but now it’s time to tackle super columns. We are still working with the BloggyAppy design from Arin Sarkissian. We are using some code from Hector’s test code.

Following Arin’s specification the Comments Column Family is going to look like this

Comments: {
 Blog-Slug:{
  Time_UUID_1:{
   Coment: A Comment,
   Email: andy@abc.com
},
Time_UUID_2:{
   Coment: A Comment,
   Email: andy@abc.com
}
}
}

Lets be clear Blog-Slug will be the Slug entry for the blog that is being commented on. This is the key we will be looking for. Under that are the supercolumn entries, with a key of type UUID. This contains a number of columns that are the entries for the comments. So to add a comment we can do this:

Keyspace ks = client.getKeyspace("BloggyAppy");
ColumnPath cp = new ColumnPath("Comments");
java.util.UUID timeUUID=getTimeUUID();              
cp.setSuper_column(asByteArray(timeUUID));
cp.setColumn(bytes("email"));
ks.insert(slugValue, cp, bytes("andy@abc.com"));
cp.setColumn(bytes("Comment"));
ks.insert(slugValue, cp, bytes("AComment"));

SlugValue is essentially the title. Note that getTimeUUID is defined as:

public static java.util.UUID getTimeUUID()
     {
return java.util.UUID.fromString(new com.eaio.uuid.UUID().toString());
     }