How to update stored references in Cosmos Document DB? - spring-boot

Question

I am very new to document based databases and am using the Cosmos Document DB from Azure in my Springboot application.
I have a data structure like this:
User:
{
"firstname": "Bob",
"password": "asdf",
"roles": [
{
"rights": [
{
"name": "RIGHT_READ"
},
{
"name": "RIGHT_WRITE"
}
],
"name": "ROLE_ADMIN",
"id": "0d5299e0-836c-494d-9299-e0836c294d55"
}
],
"id": "0a9030f1-30f8-4d23-9030-f130f85d23e7",
"email": "email#mail.com",
"username": "admin",
"lastname": "Martin"
}
Role:
{
"rights": [
{
"name": "RIGHT_READ"
},
{
"name": "RIGHT_WRITE"
}
],
"name": "ROLE_ADMIN",
"id": "0d5299e0-836c-494d-9299-e0836c294d55"
}
The user stores all roles that he is assigned to. In this case, the user stores the role ROLE_ADMIN that contains several rights.
If I am now updating the role ROLE_ADMIN, e.g. by adding a right, and storing this again in the database via documentClient.replaceDocument(docLink, role, null); the reference of this entity that is stored in the user is not updated. User still contains a role with two rights instead of three then.
Do I have to update all references manually or am I missing something?

Answer 1

CosmosDB is a non-relational database. If you are using it as a relational database then you have to do all the cascading updates manually, as CosmosDB itself doesn't know that you are referencing another document from the database. Each document is agnostic from the other.
Based on this example you also have a data integrity issue. You are storing the rights in both the role object but also the user object. What you should do instead is store the rights in the role object and then just use the role id in the user object and query for the rights based on the role id. That that way you only update the roles.