Hi all, maybe someone can help me with this problem.

We have a new requirement for our application: a partial save button
for a form.

We have a form, where the client can save a new 'Account" (an
'Account' in our model is a very big object graph with a lot of
'child' objects. An Account has Items, an Item has Deparments, and so
on).
We do this mapping our objects to a relational database using
Hibernate. In the database we have a lot 'not null' fields amd foreing
keys.

Now we need a partial save, so the client may not fill the entire
form, and save it.
So, we can't use the same object model and domain model, because we
have this 'not null' and foreing keys that now can be incomplet.

Our options right now are:

1 - Duplicate object and database model.
    For every object that could be partial saved, we need another
'draft object' and a new table in the database (eg. Account ->
AcountDraft mapped to ACCOUNT_DRAFT in the database).

2 - Replace all the 'not nulls' and foreing keys for database
constrains and use a flag field in the objects.

Does anybody have a better idea?

Thanks.