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Eclipse Profile Configuration: The Launch Requires at Least One Data Collector
I just installed TPTP into my Eclipse 3.5 under Ubuntu 9.04 and tried to profile a class. The Profile Configuration opened with a red warning reading “the launch requires at least one data collector to be selected“. Clicking the configuration’s Monitor tab reveals a more detailed error (and nothing to select): IWATO435E An error occured when connecting to the host. A quick check of the error log (Window – Show View – Other… – General – Error Log) reveals the cause: RAServer generated the following output: [Error Stream]:ACServer: error while loading shared libraries: /home/jholy/development/tools/eclipse-ide/pulse2-2.4.2/Common/plugins/org.eclipse.tptp.platform.ac.linux_ia32_4.4.202.v201002100300/agent_controller/bin/../lib/libtptpUtils.so.4: file too short Checking the content of the lib/ folder revealed an interesting thing: -rw-r–r– 1 jholy jholy 17 2010-02-16 23:16 libtptpUtils.so -rw-r–r– 1 jholy jholy 21 2010-02-16 23:16 libtptpUtils.so.4 -rwxr-xr-x 1 jholy jholy 100K 2010-02-16 23:16 libtptpUtils.so.4.5.0 As also the content of the two small files suggests (they contain a name of the corresponding file with a longer name), the *.so and *.so.4 files should have been links but the installer failed to create them. Solution List all files in the lib/ folder, you will see that there are many real files like libtptpUtils.so.4.5.0 and libxerces-c.so.26.0 and many should-be-links files. The solution is, of course, to replace all those files that shoud be links with actual links. For me the solution was: $ cd .../plugins/org.eclipse.tptp.platform.ac.linux_ia32_4.4.202.v201002100300/agent_controller/lib # Move out the files that are OK lib$ mkdir tmp lib$ mv libswt-* libcbe.so tmp/ # Fix the links lib$ for FILE in `ls *.so`; do ln -sf "${FILE}.4.5.0" $FILE; ln -sf "${FILE}.4.5.0" "${FILE}.4"; done # Move the correct files back lib$ mv tmp/* . lib$ rmdir tmp # Fix links for files with *.26 instead of *.4.5.0 lib$ ln -sf libxerces-c.so.26.0 libxerces-c.so.26 lib$ ln -sf libxerces-c.so.26.0 libxerces-c.so lib$ ln -sf libxerces-depdom.so.26.0 libxerces-depdom.so.26 lib$ ln -sf libxerces-depdom.so.26.0 libxerces-depdom.so lib$ rm libxerces-depdom.so.4 libxerces-c.so.4 # Done! Try to open the profile configuration now, the IWATO435E should have disappeared and you should be able to select a data collector. If not, restart Eclipse, try again, check the error log. My environment Ubuntu 9.04 Eclipse 3.5 TPTP – see above From http://theholyjava.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/eclipse-profile-configuration-the-launch-requires-at-least-one-data-collector/
May 14, 2010
by Jakub Holý
· 13,246 Views
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Two Ways to Convert Java Map to String
This article shows 2 ways to convert Java Map to String. Approach 1: simple, lightweight – produces query string like output, but restrictive. Approach 2: uses Java XML bean serialization, more robust but produces overly verbose output. Approach 1: Map to query string format Approach 1 converts a map to a query-string like output. Here’s what an output looks like: name1=value1&name2=value2 Full Code: import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException; import java.net.URLDecoder; import java.net.URLEncoder; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.Map; public class MapUtil { public static String mapToString(Map map) { StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder(); for (String key : map.keySet()) { if (stringBuilder.length() > 0) { stringBuilder.append("&"); } String value = map.get(key); try { stringBuilder.append((key != null ? URLEncoder.encode(key, "UTF-8") : "")); stringBuilder.append("="); stringBuilder.append(value != null ? URLEncoder.encode(value, "UTF-8") : ""); } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) { throw new RuntimeException("This method requires UTF-8 encoding support", e); } } return stringBuilder.toString(); } public static Map stringToMap(String input) { Map map = new HashMap(); String[] nameValuePairs = input.split("&"); for (String nameValuePair : nameValuePairs) { String[] nameValue = nameValuePair.split("="); try { map.put(URLDecoder.decode(nameValue[0], "UTF-8"), nameValue.length > 1 ? URLDecoder.decode( nameValue[1], "UTF-8") : ""); } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) { throw new RuntimeException("This method requires UTF-8 encoding support", e); } } return map; } } Example usage code Map map = new HashMap(); map.put("color", "red"); map.put("symbols", "{,=&*?}"); map.put("empty", ""); String output = MapUtil.mapToString(map); Map parsedMap = MapUtil.stringToMap(output); for (String key : map.keySet()) { Assert.assertEquals(parsedMap.get(key), map.get(key)); } Output with Approach 1: symbols=%7B%2C%3D%26*%3F%7D&color=red∅= Caveat Only supports String keys and values. Due to the nature of serialization, null keys and values are not supported. Null will be converted to an empty String. This is because there is no way to distinguish between a null and an empty String in the serialized form. If you need support for null keys and values, use java.beans.XMLEncoder as shown below. Approach 2: Java Bean XMLEncoder: Map to String Java provides XMLEncoder and XMLDecoder classes as part of the java.beans package as a standard way to serialize and deserialize objects. This Map map = new HashMap(); map.put("color", "red"); map.put("symbols", "{,=&*?}"); map.put("empty", ""); ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream(); XMLEncoder xmlEncoder = new XMLEncoder(bos); xmlEncoder.writeObject(map); xmlEncoder.flush(); String serializedMap = bos.toString() System.output.println(serializedMap); Output with Approach 2 The serialized value is shown below. As you can see this is more verbose, but can accommodate different data types and null keys and values. symbols {,=&*?} color red empty symbols {,=&*?} color red empty Java Bean XMLDecoder: String to Map XMLDecoder xmlDecoder = new XMLDecoder(new ByteArrayInputStream(serializedMap.getBytes())); Map parsedMap = (Map) xmlDecoder.readObject(); for (String key : map.keySet()) { Assert.assertEquals(parsedMap.get(key), map.get(key)); } Summary While Java provides a standard (and overly verbose) way to serialize and deserialize objects, this articles discusses an alternative lightweight way to convert a Java Map to String and back. If you are serializing a map with non-null String keys and values, then you should be able to use this alternative way, otherwise use the Java bean serialization. From http://www.vineetmanohar.com/2010/05/07/2-ways-to-convert-java-map-to-string
May 8, 2010
by Vineet Manohar
· 139,178 Views
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Practical PHP Patterns: Table Data Gateway
The Table Data Gateway pattern is the object-oriented equivalent of a relational table. In fact, this pattern's intent is to encapsulate the full interaction with a database table, holding all the logic specific to this particular implementation of the back end. In the majority of cases, a Table Data Gateway deals with a relational model, having a 1:1 relationship with the main tables of the database. Minor tables may not need a specific class, or can be managed via Table Data Gateways of tables that link them with foreign keys (for example entities introduced to store M:N relationships are usually not first-class citizens.) In the relational implementation, the Table Data Gateway handles all SQL queries, presenting a domain-specific interface when a class is coded for a specific table, or a generic one when a generic implementation is reused throughout different applications. The difference between the two APIs may be something like findBy($field, $value) (generic) versus findByPrice($price) (domain-specific). Note that in PHP magic methods are often used to implement domain-specific interfaces without code generation: a __call() implementation can catch the various findBy*() method and throw exceptions if the methods is not applicable. Related patterns Although, the concept of table is already correlated with a relational model (and it does not hold when the back end is an object-oriented database or one of the key-value stores so trendy today), this pattern is named Gateway because it is a specialization of the Gateway category of pattern, which decouple an object graph (or any in-memory structures) from external infrastructure like databases, web services, filesystems and so on. In fact, there is an alternate name for this pattern: Data Access Object (or DAO for friends). Although if I was pedantic I would highlight the differences between the implementations of DAOs and Table Data Gateway, their intent is really the same and there are differences in an individual pattern implementations that are greater than the ones between the different patterns. There's no clear demarcation line between the two. Another related pattern is the Table Module one. Table Data Gateway does not work against, but with a Table Module, providing a separation of concerns: the first object takes the rows out of the database, while the second performs in-memory operation on them (generally by composing the Table Data Gateway or its results). The in-memory operations of a Table Module are easier to test, but the SQL-based operations of the Table Data Gateway are pushed on the database side: there is a trade-off between the logic should be kept in each class. When used in isolation, the Table Data Gateway is also a Factory for also for Row Data Gateways or Active Records, both again implemented with generic or domain-specific interfaces. Many frameworks and first-generation PHP ORMs based on Active Record are also based on Table Data Gateway to provide a collection-level access to the objects stored as rows. In the context of Active Record, the only alternative to a Table Data Gateway to handle operations like find() is to place static methods on the Active Record class, with all the testability and dishonest API issues that ensue. Both Zend Framework and Doctrine 1.x represent tables as first-class objects. Examples Zend Framework's component Zend_Db, which is explored in the sample code, provides always generic implementations of Zend_Db_Table, and the possibility of optional subclassing (to add domain-specific methods). It is not recommend to expose the API of Table Data Gateway in front-end code, but it's a simple solution when the business logic does not warrant a full-featured Domain Model. Even when working with a Domain Model, and before the introduction of generic Data Mappers for PHP, the Table Data Gateway can be used in a composition solution (wrapped) to craft a simple API for a domain-specific Data Mapper, resulting in decoupling from the database. As I've written earlier, the sample code is taken from the Zend_Db_Table class of Zend Framework (actually from its parent abstract class, Zend_Db_Table_Abstract). I've enriched the docblock comments and left out all the methods not part of the main API (most of getters and setters for configuration and protecte|private members). $value) { switch ($key) { case self::ADAPTER: $this->_setAdapter($value); break; case self::DEFINITION: $this->setDefinition($value); break; case self::DEFINITION_CONFIG_NAME: $this->setDefinitionConfigName($value); break; case self::SCHEMA: $this->_schema = (string) $value; break; case self::NAME: $this->_name = (string) $value; break; case self::PRIMARY: $this->_primary = (array) $value; break; case self::ROW_CLASS: $this->setRowClass($value); break; case self::ROWSET_CLASS: $this->setRowsetClass($value); break; case self::REFERENCE_MAP: $this->setReferences($value); break; case self::DEPENDENT_TABLES: $this->setDependentTables($value); break; case self::METADATA_CACHE: $this->_setMetadataCache($value); break; case self::METADATA_CACHE_IN_CLASS: $this->setMetadataCacheInClass($value); break; case self::SEQUENCE: $this->_setSequence($value); break; default: // ignore unrecognized configuration directive break; } } return $this; } /** * Inserts a new row. * The data structure is as generic as possible. The list of columns is * known by configuration. * $this->_db is a light abstraction over PDO, which already encapsulates * most of the SQL. Database abstraction is not a banal task and segregating * the functionalities in different classes is very helpful. * * @param array $data Column-value pairs. * @return mixed The primary key of the row inserted. */ public function insert(array $data) { $this->_setupPrimaryKey(); /** * Zend_Db_Table assumes that if you have a compound primary key * and one of the columns in the key uses a sequence, * it's the _first_ column in the compound key. */ $primary = (array) $this->_primary; $pkIdentity = $primary[(int)$this->_identity]; /** * If this table uses a database sequence object and the data does not * specify a value, then get the next ID from the sequence and add it * to the row. We assume that only the first column in a compound * primary key takes a value from a sequence. */ if (is_string($this->_sequence) && !isset($data[$pkIdentity])) { $data[$pkIdentity] = $this->_db->nextSequenceId($this->_sequence); } /** * If the primary key can be generated automatically, and no value was * specified in the user-supplied data, then omit it from the tuple. */ if (array_key_exists($pkIdentity, $data) && $data[$pkIdentity] === null) { unset($data[$pkIdentity]); } /** * INSERT the new row. */ $tableSpec = ($this->_schema ? $this->_schema . '.' : '') . $this->_name; $this->_db->insert($tableSpec, $data); /** * Fetch the most recent ID generated by an auto-increment * or IDENTITY column, unless the user has specified a value, * overriding the auto-increment mechanism. */ if ($this->_sequence === true && !isset($data[$pkIdentity])) { $data[$pkIdentity] = $this->_db->lastInsertId(); } /** * Return the primary key value if the PK is a single column, * else return an associative array of the PK column/value pairs. */ $pkData = array_intersect_key($data, array_flip($primary)); if (count($primary) == 1) { reset($pkData); return current($pkData); } return $pkData; } /** * Updates existing rows. * Again we see generic data structures, not tied to PDO * or to particular adapters. * * @param array $data Column-value pairs. * @param array|string $where An SQL WHERE clause, or an array of SQL WHERE clauses. * @return int The number of rows updated. */ public function update(array $data, $where) { $tableSpec = ($this->_schema ? $this->_schema . '.' : '') . $this->_name; return $this->_db->update($tableSpec, $data, $where); } /** * Deletes existing rows. * * @param array|string $where SQL WHERE clause(s). * @return int The number of rows deleted. */ public function delete($where) { $tableSpec = ($this->_schema ? $this->_schema . '.' : '') . $this->_name; return $this->_db->delete($tableSpec, $where); } /** * Fetches rows by primary key. The argument specifies one or more primary * key value(s). To find multiple rows by primary key, the argument must * be an array. * * This method accepts a variable number of arguments. If the table has a * multi-column primary key, the number of arguments must be the same as * the number of columns in the primary key. To find multiple rows in a * table with a multi-column primary key, each argument must be an array * with the same number of elements. * * The find() method always returns a Rowset object, even if only one row * was found. * * @param mixed $key The value(s) of the primary keys. * @return Zend_Db_Table_Rowset_Abstract Row(s) matching the criteria. * @throws Zend_Db_Table_Exception */ public function find() { $this->_setupPrimaryKey(); $args = func_get_args(); $keyNames = array_values((array) $this->_primary); if (count($args) < count($keyNames)) { require_once 'Zend/Db/Table/Exception.php'; throw new Zend_Db_Table_Exception("Too few columns for the primary key"); } if (count($args) > count($keyNames)) { require_once 'Zend/Db/Table/Exception.php'; throw new Zend_Db_Table_Exception("Too many columns for the primary key"); } $whereList = array(); $numberTerms = 0; foreach ($args as $keyPosition => $keyValues) { $keyValuesCount = count($keyValues); // Coerce the values to an array. // Don't simply typecast to array, because the values // might be Zend_Db_Expr objects. if (!is_array($keyValues)) { $keyValues = array($keyValues); } if ($numberTerms == 0) { $numberTerms = $keyValuesCount; } else if ($keyValuesCount != $numberTerms) { require_once 'Zend/Db/Table/Exception.php'; throw new Zend_Db_Table_Exception("Missing value(s) for the primary key"); } $keyValues = array_values($keyValues); for ($i = 0; $i < $keyValuesCount; ++$i) { if (!isset($whereList[$i])) { $whereList[$i] = array(); } $whereList[$i][$keyPosition] = $keyValues[$i]; } } $whereClause = null; if (count($whereList)) { $whereOrTerms = array(); $tableName = $this->_db->quoteTableAs($this->_name, null, true); foreach ($whereList as $keyValueSets) { $whereAndTerms = array(); foreach ($keyValueSets as $keyPosition => $keyValue) { $type = $this->_metadata[$keyNames[$keyPosition]]['DATA_TYPE']; $columnName = $this->_db->quoteIdentifier($keyNames[$keyPosition], true); $whereAndTerms[] = $this->_db->quoteInto( $tableName . '.' . $columnName . ' = ?', $keyValue, $type); } $whereOrTerms[] = '(' . implode(' AND ', $whereAndTerms) . ')'; } $whereClause = '(' . implode(' OR ', $whereOrTerms) . ')'; } // issue ZF-5775 (empty where clause should return empty rowset) if ($whereClause == null) { $rowsetClass = $this->getRowsetClass(); if (!class_exists($rowsetClass)) { require_once 'Zend/Loader.php'; Zend_Loader::loadClass($rowsetClass); } return new $rowsetClass(array('table' => $this, 'rowClass' => $this->getRowClass(), 'stored' => true)); } return $this->fetchAll($whereClause); } /** * Fetches a new blank row (not from the database). * Thanks to the metadata, a new Row Data Gateway can be created. This * if a Factory Method. The dynamic nature of PHP makes configuring the * subclass for the Row Data Gateway as simple as defining a string. * * @param array $data OPTIONAL data to populate in the new row. * @param string $defaultSource OPTIONAL flag to force default values into new row * @return Zend_Db_Table_Row_Abstract */ public function createRow(array $data = array(), $defaultSource = null) { $cols = $this->_getCols(); $defaults = array_combine($cols, array_fill(0, count($cols), null)); // nothing provided at call-time, take the class value if ($defaultSource == null) { $defaultSource = $this->_defaultSource; } if (!in_array($defaultSource, array(self::DEFAULT_CLASS, self::DEFAULT_DB, self::DEFAULT_NONE))) { $defaultSource = self::DEFAULT_NONE; } if ($defaultSource == self::DEFAULT_DB) { foreach ($this->_metadata as $metadataName => $metadata) { if (($metadata['DEFAULT'] != null) && ($metadata['NULLABLE'] !== true || ($metadata['NULLABLE'] === true && isset($this->_defaultValues[$metadataName]) && $this->_defaultValues[$metadataName] === true)) && (!(isset($this->_defaultValues[$metadataName]) && $this->_defaultValues[$metadataName] === false))) { $defaults[$metadataName] = $metadata['DEFAULT']; } } } elseif ($defaultSource == self::DEFAULT_CLASS && $this->_defaultValues) { foreach ($this->_defaultValues as $defaultName => $defaultValue) { if (array_key_exists($defaultName, $defaults)) { $defaults[$defaultName] = $defaultValue; } } } $config = array( 'table' => $this, 'data' => $defaults, 'readOnly' => false, 'stored' => false ); $rowClass = $this->getRowClass(); if (!class_exists($rowClass)) { require_once 'Zend/Loader.php'; Zend_Loader::loadClass($rowClass); } $row = new $rowClass($config); $row->setFromArray($data); return $row; } }
May 5, 2010
by Giorgio Sironi
· 8,029 Views
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Practical PHP Patterns: Domain Model
The architectural pattern I'd like to talk about in this article is the overly famous Domain Model. An application's Domain Model is simply defined as an object graph created from domain-specific classes; when present, a Domain Model is the core of the application, where all the business logic resides. This object graph is employed by upper layers of an application which present it to the user. The metaphor for this methodology In software development, the term domain (or business domain) is an umbrella for the area the application is built in, and that it will serve. The new domains we encounter as we move to new projects are one of the most interesting points of software development, where we are constantly embracing new fields and gaining knowledge. Given a domain such as a particular industry (chemical, electronics) or business (air travelling, e-commerce), the point of connection of an application with these activities is its model. A model is an abstract representation of the reality of the domain, which captures its interesting and relevant aspects. The practice of modelling is not a specific trait of software development (in particular model-driven development), but it is a more general scientifical process. For example, everyone who works in the field of information technology knows the voltage/current relationships for simple components such as resistors and capacitors (Ohm's law and current derivative of the voltage). The specific domain here is electronics, and this model is named lumped component model, essentially because it lets a designer connect isolated one-port (two terminals) components to build his desired circuit. This model is a simplification of much more complex models of reality: the Maxwell equations and the propagation of electromagnetic fields; the lumped component model is valid whenever the frequency of the voltage/current signals in the circuit is low, so that the wavelengths of these signals are far greater than the dimensions of the circuit (if that goes over your head, don't worry, it's the field of electrical engineers.) When designers consider larger circuits, such as a transmission line, this model ceases to give correct results and more general ones must be employed. The domain is almost the same, but the model serves a different purpose and has to be necessarily different from the one used in small scale circuits. This complex example is here only to show that given a domain, there is no single model for it, but there are many possible ones which may adapt more or less reliably to the goals of an application. Starting from a modelling phase and deep understanding of the domain are key points of Domain-Driven Design, one of the ascending methodologies for developing complex enterprise software. Software models While there are standard mathematical models for many domains in the scientific world, software developers usually build a tailored one in every different application, performing an analysis of the domain (or at least they should.) The result of the modelling can comprehend document or diagrams, but the most powerful artifact is an executable model. Object-oriented programming is a almost perfect paradigm when it comes to modelling the real world, and lets the developers construct a Domain Model in the form of a set of classes. In a correct implementation of a Domain Model, these classes should be behaviorally complete: they must encapsulate their data as much as possible and expose a set of methods, while avoiding their usage as dumb data containers. The bread and butter of a Domain Model are the classical example of User, Post, Forum, Group, PrivateMessage classes, which are usually in a one to one relationship with database tables. But the Domain Model is not limited to these Entity classes: it also "comprehends" ValueObjects (modelization of domain-specific data types) and various kinds of Services. Every class that encapsulates business logic is welcome, so that this logic is not duplicated in upper layers, which are the primary clients of the Domain Model. Dependencies and purity Another key trait of the classes included in the Domain Model is the absence of external dependencies, like a library to store in the data contained in the objects in a database. The code artifact in a Domain Model are either interfaces, or Plain Old Php Objects (classes which do not extend any external abstract superclass.) Active Record approaches should be avoided because not only a relational database is an infrastructure detail not included in the Domain Model itself, but the very concept of persistence is abstracted away. As far as the clients of the Domain Model are concerned, the state and behavior of the application are represented by an in-memory object graph, whose methods expose functionalities and which client code can play with. There are no dependencies from a Domain Model towards infrastructure classes, because these dependencies must be inverted. The resulting system is an instance of the hexagonal architecture, where the Domain Model defines ports (interfaces) and infrastructure can be chosen to provide adapters for these ports (implementations in the form of classes extraneous to the model). The implementaton of non-invasive persistence is the subject of the Data Mapper pattern, which will be treated later in this series, but every kind of service implementation which communicate with the outside of the core object graph (databases, network, filesystem) is only defined as a contract in the Domain Model. Persistence is almost always dealt with a library in other object-oriented languages, now also in PHP with a non-invasive ORM such as Doctrine 2. Nothing obstructs the developers from implementing a specific Data Mapper by hand, but it's a very repetitive and prone to errors task. While in origin simpler, invasive patterns such as Active Record could be used in a Domain Model, nowadays with Data Mapper availables it is considered an hack. Sample Returning to the subject of the Domain Model as the core of an application, the diffused opinion is that the more complex the business logic and the data involved, the more the application benefits from a rich Domain Model. Thus, this pattern should not be used in small-sized applications where there is no much more logic than CRUD screens for data containers, which unfortunately were a target for PHP in the last ten years. I hope PHP keeps evolving to finally break in the enterprise segment, where this pattern is most valuable. Due to the size and scope of this article, I am forced to keep the sample code short. Forgive me if you think that you can achieve the same functionality with fewer lines of code, but this pattern is about architecture and should highlight the separation of concerns between classes more than the KISS principle. Another problem with code samples in modelling is that you have to actually know the domain well to follow the discussion. For this reason I chose a webmail system for this example. _sender; } /** * Do we need setters and getters? Every field should be * analyzed. If we can keep it private and inaccessible, * it's usually better. */ public function setSender($sender) { $this->_sender = $sender; } /** * @return string */ public function getRecipient() { return $this->_recipient; } public function setRecipient($recipient) { $this->_recipient = $recipient; } /** * @return string */ public function getSubject() { return $this->_subject; } public function setSubject($subject) { $this->_subject = $subject; } /** * @return string */ public function getText() { return $this->_text; } public function setText($text) { $this->_text = $text; } public function __toString() { return $this->_subject . ' > ' . substr($this->_text, 0, 20) . '...'; } public function reply() { $reply = new Email(); $reply->setRecipient($this->_sender); $reply->setSender($this->_recipient); $reply->setSubject('Re: ' . $this->_subject); $reply->setText($this->_sender . " wrote:\n" . $this->_text); return $reply; } } /** * Interface for a service. This is part of the Domain Model, * implementations will be plugged in depending on the environment. */ interface EmailRepository { /** * @return array * @TypeOf(Email) */ public function getEmailsFor($recipient); } // client code $mail = new Email(); $mail->setSender("[email protected]"); $mail->setRecipient("[email protected]"); $mail->setSubject('Hello'); $mail->setText('This is a test of an Email object, which is part of our Domain Model.'); echo $mail, "\n"; $reply = $mail->reply(); echo $reply, "\n";
April 25, 2010
by Giorgio Sironi
· 8,049 Views
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“When a class with type parameters is not a parameterized class” – a Java Generics Puzzler
while recently fiddling with some more runtime generic type extraction for deployit , i was caught out by some unexpected behaviour by the reflection api. a check of the javadocs quickly revealed that i had once again been too hasty in relying on "common sense". still, the case seems sufficiently unintuitive to merit discussion. in this case, the issue centres on the interplay between class.gettypeparameters and parameterizedtype . the gist of the code looks something like: interface spying {} // small class hierarchy class person {} class professional extends person {} class agent extends professional {} class assassin extends professional {} class bystander extends person {} ... person jbond = new agent(); system.out.println("generic superclass type argument: " + trygetsuperclassgenerictypeparam(jbond)); person joepublic = new bystander(); system.out.println("generic superclass type argument: " + trygetsuperclassgenerictypeparam(joepublic)); person oddjob = new assassin(); system.out.println("generic superclass type argument: " + trygetsuperclassgenerictypeparam(oddjob)); ... type trygetsuperclassgenerictypeparam(object obj) { class clazz = obj.getclass(); class superclass = clazz.getsuperclass(); // elvis would be preferred, but for the sake of clarity... if (superclass.gettypeparameters().length > 0) { return ((parameterizedtype) clazz.getgenericsuperclass()).getactualtypearguments()[0]; } else { return null; } } so...what happens? trygetsuperclassgenerictypeparam is where the action happens. it seems fairly straightforward: see if the object's superclass is generic (i.e. takes type parameters) and, if so, cast its type representation to parameterizedtype to extract the actual value for the type parameter. if the superclass is not generic, simply return null. when this code is run, the first two invocations of trygetsuperclassgenerictypeparam result in the expected: generic superclass type argument: interface spying generic superclass type argument: null what about the third one? well, given the fact that we've omitted to specify a generic type parameter for professional we might assume 1 that we'd also get null. the actual output, however, is: exception in thread "main" java.lang.classcastexception: java.lang.class cannot be cast to java.lang.reflect.parameterizedtype at trygetsuperclassgenerictypeparam(...) huh? in order to figure out what's going on here, let's have a look at the javadoc for class.gettypeparameters: returns an array of typevariable objects that represent the type variables declared by the generic declaration represented by this genericdeclaration object, in declaration order. returns an array of length 0 if the underlying generic declaration declares no type variables. in other words, this is returning class-level information about the declaration of, in our case, the professional class, which of course does have a type parameter. however, if we look at class.getgenericsuperclass 2 , which we invoke next, we find that it: returns the type representing the direct superclass of the entity [...] represented by this class. if the superclass is a parameterized type, the type object returned must accurately reflect the actual type parameters used in the source code. here, the information returned is specific to the actual declaration of the class, which may (or may not, as in our case) specify type paramaters for its superclass. and therein lies the problem: professional.class.gettypearguments looks at the declaration of the professional class, discovering a type argument, whereas assassin.class.getgenericsuperclass looks at the occurrence of professional in the declaration of assassin and discovers no type parameters. hence, it returns a class rather than a parameterizedtype and blows up our code. ergo to cut a long story short: if an object's superclass has type arguments as determined by class.gettypearguments that does not mean that object.getclass().getgenericsuperclass() will be a parameterizedtype. footnotes read "i assumed" it's a pity that class.getgenericsignature , which determines the "generic or not" behaviour of class.getgenericsuperclass, is private, native and undocumented. from http://blog.xebia.com/2010/04/22/when-a-class-with-type-parameters-is-not-a-parameterized-class-a-java-generics-puzzler/
April 22, 2010
by Andrew Phillips
· 28,494 Views
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Extract constants from strings and numbers with Eclipse refactorings
For readability’s sake, it’s almost always a good idea to replace magic numbers and string literals with constants. That’s all good, but it can take a bit of time to refactor these to constants, especially strings or parts of strings. For example, in the code below we want to refactor “shovel and spade” to a private static final String called TOOLS. To do that manually would take some time. It goes even slower if we only want to extract “spade” to a constant because we first have to convert the string to a concatenation. String tools = "shovel and spade"; ... String otherTools = "shovel and spade"; Luckily, Eclipse has a couple of ways to instantly convert literals to constants. Coupled with tools to speed up string selection and to pick out part of a string, you have the ability to create a constant in about 2 seconds flat. I’ll discuss all these features below. Extract a constant from a string/number There are 2 ways to extract a constant, the one uses a quick fix and the other a refactoring. I’ll show the quick fix method first and then the refactoring and discuss the (small) differences between the two. The example uses a string, but everything is true for numbers as well. Follow these steps to use the quick fix: First select the string. The fastest way is to place the cursor on the string and press Alt+Shift+Up (Select Enclosing Element; a nifty shortcut that I discuss in Select strings and methods with a single keystroke). After selecting the string, press Ctr+1 (Quick Fix) and then select Extract to constant. Eclipse will do the following: (a) Create a private final static variable of type String with a default name, (b) replace all occurrences of that string with the constant and (c) place the cursor on the constant’s declaration to give you a chance to change the name, type and visibility of the variable using placeholders that you can Tab through. Once you’re happy with the constant details, press Enter to go back to the line on which you initiated the quick fix. Here’s a short video with an example of using quick fix. We’ll extract a constant (called TOOLS) from a string literal (“shovel and spade”) that’s used in two places. Note: You can use Tab to move from one placeholder to another and pressing Enter will get you back to your original line. The other way to extract a constant is by using the Extract Constant refactoring. Again, select the string, then select Refactor > Extract Constant… (Alt+T, A) from the application menu. A dialog appears prompting you for the constant’s name, its visibility and whether to replace all occurrences of the string with the constant. After you’ve entered the details, press Enter and you’ll have your constant defined. Here’s a short video with an example using refactoring. We’ll use the same example as above. The differences between the two? Not much, the biggest difference being when you enter the details of the constant (ie. before the change is made or after). The refactoring dialog also provides an option to add the qualifying type name before the constant’s usage, but most of time this is redundant. I’d recommend using the quick fix, unless you’re more comfortable with dialogs. BTW, you can assign custom keyboard shortcuts to either command by mapping either Quick Assist – Extract Constant or the command Extract Constant. Pick out part of a string Sometimes you’ll want to break up a string into multiple parts and convert one of those parts into a constant. Eclipse can do this automatically. Select the part of the string you want to pick out (don’t worry about quotes), press Ctrl+1 and choose Pick out selected part of String. Eclipse will convert that part into a string with quotes, concatenate it to the rest of the string and select it. You can then use any of the Extract Constant tools above. Here’s an example of how to use this feature. Notice how the string’s already selected so we can use the Extract Constant quick fix immediately. Related Tips Select entire strings and methods in Eclipse with a single keystroke Convert string concatenations into StringBuilder or MessageFormat calls with Eclipse’s Quick Fix How to manage keyboard shortcuts in Eclipse and why you should Join/split if statements and rearrange expressions using Eclipse Quick Fix More tips on using quick fixes and making editing faster.
April 19, 2010
by Byron M
· 21,665 Views · 1 Like
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Jetty Browser Cache Control
Do you use Jetty and need to change the default setting for browser cache control? Have a look at the init-param element named cacheControl in webdefault.xml. Here’s the default configuration for the version of Jetty I use. Note the element is commented. To enable and configure browser cache control, uncomment and edit the param-value as appropriate. The following example instructs the browser to disable all caching. cacheControl no-store,no-cache,must-revalidate For information on Cache-Control, see RFC 2616, Section 14.9. From http://codeaweso.me/2009/09/jetty-browser-cache-control/
April 10, 2010
by Mike Christianson
· 16,321 Views
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What To Do When A Hard Drive Fails
When a hard drive crashes, you can lose all your data. Corrupt hard drives happen out of the blue and for seemingly no good reason. If your hard drive fails, what can you do? One option is to call a hard drive recovery company. If your data is worth a lot of money to you, you can pay a forensic computer company to get the data off your hard drive. Before you write a check though, try a little Do-It-Yourself first. What is going on inside the hard drive is a bunch of little platters spinning at high speed. When data is accessed or written to the disk, a little head (sort of like on a record player) moves to the right spot and does it's magic. The space between the head and the platter is very very tiny. Freezing the hard drive will shrink the head and the platter ever so slightly, often allowing you to read data. Here is how I got the data off of a failed hard drive. Remove the hard drive from the computer. Place the hard drive inside of a zip top freezer bag. (don't buy a cheap bag.) Place the wrapped hard drive inside of ANOTHER zip top freezer bag. (yes, you need to do this) (see figure 1 below) Place the double wrapped hard drive in the coldest part of your freezer. Leave the hard drive in the freezer for 12 hours at least. You want it good and cold! (see figure 2 below) Once very chilled, install the hard drive in your computer and start pulling off data. Begin with the most valuable data. At some point, the hard drive will fail again. When it does, mark the last successfully copied data, pull out the hard drive, double wrap it again and stick it in the Chill Chest for another 12 hours. You may need to do this a number of times to get all the data you want, or until the hard drive stops working completely. Double Wrapped Hard Drive Hard Drive in the Freezer
April 5, 2010
by Dan Wilson
· 124,546 Views · 1 Like
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Unrolling Spock: Advanced @Unroll Usages in 0.4
Some of the Spock Framework 0.4 features are starting to see the light of day, with the Data Tables being explained last week in a nice blog post from Peter Niederwieser. One of the new features that I had not seen before is the new advanced @Unroll usage. Mixed with Data Tables, it produces some very cool results, and it can still be used with 0.3 style specs as well. Here's the juice: JUnit Integration and @Unroll Spock is built on JUnit, and has always had good IDE support without any effort from you as a user. For the most part, the IDEs just think Spock is another unit test. Here's the a Spock spec for the new Data Tables feature and how it shows up in an IDE. import spock.lang.* class TableTest extends Specification { def "maximum of two numbers"() { expect: Math.max(a, b) == c where: a | b | c 3 | 7 | 7 5 | 4 | 5 9 | 9 | 9 } } The assertion will be run 3 times: once for each row in the data table. And JUnit faithfully reports the method name correctly, even when the method names has a space in it: The problem with data driven tests and xUnit is poor error location. When a test fails you will receive an error stating which method is the culprit... but what if the method runs an assertion across 50 or 60 pieces of data? The cause of a failure is almost never clear with data driven tests. At it's worst you have to step through several iterations of code waiting for an exception. Good tests have a clear point of failure, but good tests also do not repeat themselves with boilerplate. This is exactly why Spock has the @Unroll annotation. As a test author you get to write one concise unit test, and JUnit does the work of reporting results that help you isolate failures. Consider the same test method with the @Unroll annotation and the accompanying IDE output. @Unroll def "maximum of two numbers"() { expect: Math.max(a, b) == c where: a | b | c 3 | 7 | 7 5 | 4 | 5 9 | 9 | 9 } When executed, JUnit sees three test methods instead of one: one for each row in the data table: The end result for you as a test writer is accurate failure resolution. You can pinpoint exactly which row failed. This feature is available in Spock 0.3 and you can use it today. What is new in 0.4 is the ability to change the test name dynamically. Here is a full @Unroll annotation that changes the method name: @Unroll("maximum of #a and #b is #c") def "maximum of two numbers"() { expect: Math.max(a, b) == c where: a | b | c 3 | 7 | 7 5 | 4 | 5 9 | 9 | 9 } Notice the #variable syntax in the annotation parameter. The # produces a sort of GString-like variable substitution that lets you bind columns from your data table into your test name. The annotation parameter references #a, #b, and #c, which aligns with the data table definition of a | b | c. Check out the IDE output: Previously, the test name was just the iteration number within the test. The new @Unroll parameter allows you to make the test name much more meaningful. Your tests will improve because failures become more descriptive. Unrolled failure messages before simply had the iteration name embedded in them, while now they can have meaningful data that you prescribe. My favorite part of playing with the new @Unroll was to see the default value of the parameter within the Spock source code: java.lang.String value() default "#featureName[#iterationCount]"; Talk about eating your own dog food... the default value is a test name template, just like you could have written in your own test. Makes you wonder what other variables are in scope, huh? Spock snapshot builds for 0.4 are available at: http://m2repo.spockframework.org. Get it before the link breaks. From http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com
March 24, 2010
by Hamlet D'Arcy
· 36,321 Views · 1 Like
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Cache Java Webapps with Squid Reverse Proxy
This article shows you step by step how to cache your entire tomcat web application with Squid reverse Proxy without writing any Java code. What is Squid Squid is a free proxy server for HTTP, HTTPS and FTP which saves bandwidth and increases response time by caching frequently requested web pages. While squid can be used as a proxy server when users try to download pages from the internet, it can be also used as a reverse-proxy by putting squid between the user and your webapp. All user requests first hit Squid. If the requested page already exists in Squid’s cache it is served directly from the cache without hitting your Webapp. If the page does not exist in Squid’s cache, it is fetched from your web application and stored in the cache for future requests. Squid reduces hits to your server by caching response pages. You don’t have to worry about building page level caching in every application that your write, Squid takes care of that part. When should I use Squid Ideally you should use Squid for pages which have a high ratio of reads to writes. In other words, a page that changes less frequently but is accessed very often. Here are some scenarios: A dynamical web page which displays news and is updated once an hour, and receives hundreds of hits during the hour A static web page accessed freqently. Squid can give performance boost by caching frequently accessed static web pages in memory When should I not use Squid In most cases, if the request URL is the only factor which determines the response then you can safely use Squid. See more specific examples below: If the entire apps is very dynamic in nature, and the validity of pages changes immediately. Squid is not suitable for apps which require login. This unfortunately is a large number of applications. Such applications need to resort to back end caching, for example use other caching frameworks like Ehcache to cache re-usable page fragments and/or cache database queries and/or other performance bottlenecks. Apps which heavily use browser cookies. Squid relies on URLs to cache pages. If the page served is computed from URLs + cookies, then you should not cache those pages in Squid. How does the overall setup work Apache Squid Tomcat architecture Apache receives requests on port 80. Apache calls Squid with the request. Squid checks its cache to see if it has the response cached from before. If yes and if the response is not expired, it returns the cached response.In this case: Squid will write the following header to the response X-Cache: HIT from www.vineetmanohar.com X-Cache: HIT from www.vineetmanohar.com If the response is not found in Squid’s cache, squid will make a call to Tomcat on port 8082. Tomcat’s proxy connector is listening on this port. It processes the request and sends the response back to Squid. Squid saves the response in its cache, unless caching is disabled for that URL. Squid returns the final response to Apache which sends the response back to the user. What if I don’t want to use Apache Using Apache is not required to use Squid. You can run Squid on port 80, and point your users directly to Squid. If that is the case, skip section one and directly jump to section 2 below. Step 1/3: Apache Httpd Config If you are using Apache as a front end, you need to instruct Apache to forward requests to Squid at port 3128. See the following code snippet. Change the server name and paths to reflect your real values. Apache config file: /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf ServerName www.vineetmanohar.com DocumentRoot /home/webadmin/www.vineetmanohar.com/html # forward requests to squid running on port 3128 ProxyPass / http://localhost:3128/ ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:3128/ /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf ServerName www.vineetmanohar.com DocumentRoot /home/webadmin/www.vineetmanohar.com/html # forward requests to squid running on port 3128 ProxyPass / http://localhost:3128/ ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:3128/ In addition to the above, you also need mod_proxy installed. If you see the following in your httpd.conf, you probably already have mod_proxy installed. If you first need to install mod_proxy LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so Step 2/3: Squid Config First make sure that Squid is installed on your server. You can download Squid from here. The squid config file on Linux/Unix is located at this location /etc/squid/squid.conf /etc/squid/squid.conf The config file is pretty long. Follow these instructions and set the values appropriately. 1. # leave the port to 3128 2. http_port 3128 3. 4. # how much memory cache do you want? depends on how much memory you have on the machine 5. cache_mem 200 MB 6. 7. # what's the biggest page that you want stored in memory. If you home page is 100 KB and 8. # you want it stored in memory, you may set it to a number bigger than that. 9. maximum_object_size_in_memory 100 KB 10. 11. # how much disk cache do you want. It is 6400 MB in the following example, change it as per 12. # your needs. Make sure you have that much disk space free. 13. cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid 6400 16 256 14. 15. # this is probably the most important config section. Here you can configure the cache life for 16. # each URL pattern. 17. 18. # Time is in minutes 19. # 1 day = 1440, 2 days = 2880, 7 days = 10080, 28 days = 40320 20. 21. # do not cache url1 22. refresh_pattern ^http://127.0.0.1:8082/url1/ 0 20% 0 23. 24. # cache url2 for 1 day 25. refresh_pattern ^http://127.0.0.1:8082/url2/ 1440 20% 1440 override-expire override-lastmod reload-into-ims ignore-reload 26. 27. # cache css for 7 days 28. refresh_pattern ^http://127.0.0.1:8082/css 10080 20% 10080 override-expire override-lastmod reload-into-ims ignore-reload 29. 30. # by default cache the whole website for 1 minute 31. refresh_pattern ^http://127.0.0.1:8082/ 0 20% 0 override-expire override-lastmod reload-into-ims ignore-reload 32. 33. # how long should the errors should be cached for. For example 404s, HTTP 500 errors 34. negative_ttl 0 seconds 35. 36. # On which host does tomcat run. Set 127.0.0.1 for localhost 37. httpd_accel_host 127.0.0.1 38. 39. # this is the proxy port as defined in Tomcat server.xml. By default it is "8082" 40. httpd_accel_port 8082 41. 42. # set this to "on". Read more documentation if you want to change this. 43. httpd_accel_single_host on 44. 45. # To access Squid stats via the manager interface, you need to enter a password here 46. cachemgr_passwd your_clear_text_password all 47. 48. # Say "off" if you want the query string to appear in the squid logs. 49. strip_query_terms off # leave the port to 3128 http_port 3128 # how much memory cache do you want? depends on how much memory you have on the machine cache_mem 200 MB # what's the biggest page that you want stored in memory. If you home page is 100 KB and # you want it stored in memory, you may set it to a number bigger than that. maximum_object_size_in_memory 100 KB # how much disk cache do you want. It is 6400 MB in the following example, change it as per # your needs. Make sure you have that much disk space free. cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid 6400 16 256 # this is probably the most important config section. Here you can configure the cache life for # each URL pattern. # Time is in minutes # 1 day = 1440, 2 days = 2880, 7 days = 10080, 28 days = 40320 # do not cache url1 refresh_pattern ^http://127.0.0.1:8082/url1/ 0 20% 0 # cache url2 for 1 day refresh_pattern ^http://127.0.0.1:8082/url2/ 1440 20% 1440 override-expire override-lastmod reload-into-ims ignore-reload # cache css for 7 days refresh_pattern ^http://127.0.0.1:8082/css 10080 20% 10080 override-expire override-lastmod reload-into-ims ignore-reload # by default cache the whole website for 1 minute refresh_pattern ^http://127.0.0.1:8082/ 0 20% 0 override-expire override-lastmod reload-into-ims ignore-reload # how long should the errors should be cached for. For example 404s, HTTP 500 errors negative_ttl 0 seconds # On which host does tomcat run. Set 127.0.0.1 for localhost httpd_accel_host 127.0.0.1 # this is the proxy port as defined in Tomcat server.xml. By default it is "8082" httpd_accel_port 8082 # set this to "on". Read more documentation if you want to change this. httpd_accel_single_host on # To access Squid stats via the manager interface, you need to enter a password here cachemgr_passwd your_clear_text_password all # Say "off" if you want the query string to appear in the squid logs. strip_query_terms off Step 3/3: Tomcat Config Make sure that the HTTP Proxy Connector is defined in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml. If needed, see additional documentation on Tomcat proxy connector. Squid Manager Interface You can access the Squid config and stats via the Squid Manger HTTP interface. Make sure that the “cachemgr.cgi” file which ships with squid installation is in your cgi-bin directory. More documentation on setting that up here. Once you’ve set it up, you can access the cache manager via this URL: http:///cgi-bin/cachemgr.cgi http:///cgi-bin/cachemgr.cgi To continue enter the following values: Cache host: localhost Cache port: 3128 Manager name: manager Password: Cache host: localhost Cache port: 3128 Manager name: manager Password: Store Directory Stats shows you how much disk space is used by the disk cache. Cache Client List show you the cache HIT/MISS ratio as %. You should monitor this frequently and tune your cache to get a higher hit %. Reload Squid Config without restarting Edit the squid config using “vi” or your favorite editor vi /etc/squid/squid.conf vi /etc/squid/squid.conf Once you are done editing, reload the new config without restarting Squid /usr/sbin/squid -k reconfigure /usr/sbin/squid -k reconfigure Clearing Squid Cache To clear Squid cache: 1) Set the memory cache to 4 MB (or a lower number) cache_mem 8 MB cache_mem 8 MB 2) Set the disk cache to 8 MB (or a lower number). The disk cache must be higher that the memory cache. cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid 20 16 256 cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid 20 16 256 3) Reload squid config without restart as described in the previous section 4) You may need to wait a few hours for the cache to get cleared. Once the cache is clear, you may restore the previous cache sizes and reload the new config again. You can monitor the cache size through the Squid Manager HTTP interface. Bypassing Squid If for some reason you need to bypass Squid, reconfigure Apache to directly send requests to Tomcat. Edit the Apache config file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf # forward requests directly to Tomcat's proxy connector running on port 8082 ProxyPass / http://localhost:8082/ ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8082/ # forward requests directly to Tomcat's proxy connector running on port 8082 ProxyPass / http://localhost:8082/ ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8082/ You will need to restart Apache after making this change. /etc/init.d/httpd restart Conclusion Squid is a very powerful tool for caching. It is not for all applications. Please examine the need of your application and use squid appropriately. I’ve used squid for several years for caching the output from a Java data mashup application and am very satisfied with the ease of use and benefits. Hope you found this tutorial useful. Feel free to post a comment or share your experience with squid. References Squid official website From http://www.vineetmanohar.com
March 10, 2010
by Vineet Manohar
· 109,080 Views · 1 Like
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Open Source NoSQL Databases
For almost a year now, the idea of "NoSQL" has been spreading due to the demand for relational database alternatives. Maybe the biggest motivation behind NoSQL is scalability. Relational databases don't lend themselves well to the kind of horizontal scalability that's required for large-scale social networking or cloud applications, and ORMs can abstract away impedance mismatch only so much. In other cases, companies just don't need as many of the complex features and rigid schemas provided by relational databases. Most people are not suggesting that we all ditch the RDBMS, in fact, many companies don't really need to switch. Relational databases will probably be necessary for many applications years and years from now. In essence, NoSQL is a movement that aims to reexamine the way we structure data and draw attention to innovation in hopes of finding the solution to the next generation's data persistence problems. Here are some of the better known open source data stores/models labeled as "NoSQL": CouchDB- Document Store Maps keys to data It provides a RESTful JSON API and is written in Erlang You can upload functions to index data and then you can call those functions Has a very simple REST interface Provides an innovative replication strategy - nodes can reconnect, sync, and reconcile differences after being disconnected for long periods of time Enables new distributed types of applications and data MongoDB - Document Store Free-form key-value-like data store with good performance Powerful, expansive query model Usability rivals that of Redis Good for complex data storage needs. Production-quality sharding capabilities Neo4j - GraphDB Disk-based Has a restricted, single-threaded model for graph traversal Has optional layers to expose Neo4j as an RDF store Can handle graphs of several billion nodes, relationships, or properties on a single machine Released under a dual license - free for non-commercial use Apache Hbase - Wide Column Store/Column Families Built on top of Hadoop, which has functionality similar to Google's GFS and MapReduce systems Hadoop's HDFS provides a mechanism that reliably stores and organizes large amounts of data Random access performance is on par with MySQL Has a high performance Thrift gateway Cascading source and sink modules Redis - Key Value/Tuple Store Provides a rich API and does more operations in memory, using disk only periodically. It's extremely fast Lets you append a value to the end of a list of items that's already been stored on a key. Has atomic operations, making it a best-of-breed tally server. Memcached - Key Value/Tuple Store High-performance, distributed memory object caching Free and open source Generic and agnostic to the objects/strings it caches It's all in-memory data Simple yet elegant design enables easy development and deployment Language neutral caching scheme. Most of the large properties on the web are using it now, except for Microsoft Project Voldemort - Eventually Consistent Key Value Store Used by LinkedIn Handles server failure transparently Pluggable serialization supports rich keys and values including lists and tuples with named fields Supports common serialization frameworks including Protocol Buffers, Thrift, and Java Serialization Data items are versioned Supports pluggable data placement strategies Memory caching and the storage system are combined Tokyo Cabinet and Tokyo Tyrant - Key Value/Tuple Store Supports hashtable mode, b-tree mode, and table mode It's fast and straightforward Good for small to medium-sized amounts of data that require rapid updating and can be easily modeled in terms of keys and values Cassandra - Wide Column Store/Column Families First developed by Facebook SuperColumns can turn a simple key-value architecture into an architecture that handles sorted lists, based on an index specified by the user. Can scale from one node to several thousand nodes clustered in different data centers. Can be tuned for more consistency or availability Smooth node replacement if one goes down ____ Some other well known NoSQL-style data stores that are closed source include Google BigTable and Amazon SimpleDB. GigaSpaces is a popular space-based Grid solution that has NoSQL qualities. Check out this informative post on NoSQL patterns.
February 23, 2010
by Mitch Pronschinske
· 46,083 Views
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Abstract Factory Pattern Tutorial with Java Examples
Learn the Abstract Factory Design Pattern with easy Java source code examples as James Sugrue continues his design patterns tutorial series, Design Patterns Uncovered
February 23, 2010
by James Sugrue
· 267,465 Views · 15 Likes
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Rules of Thumb: Don't Use the Session
A while ago I wrote about some rules of thumb that I'd been taught by my colleagues with respect to software development and I was reminded of one of them – don't put anything in the session – during a presentation my colleague Luca Grulla gave at our client on scaling applications by making use of the infrastructure of the web. The problem with putting state in the session is that it means that requests from a specific user have to be tied to a specific server i.e. we have to use a sticky session/session affinity. This reduces our ability to scale our system horizontally (scale out) i.e. by adding more servers to handle requests. If, for example, we have a small amount of users (whose first request went to the same server) making a lot of requests (perhaps through AJAX calls) then we may quickly put one of our servers under load while the others are sitting there idle. In addition we have increased complexity around our deployment process. If we want to do an incremental deployment of a new version of our website across some of our servers then we need to ensure that we create a copy of any sessions on those servers and copy them to the ones we're not updating so that any users still on the system don't experience loss of data. There are no doubts products which can allow us to do this more easily but it seems to me to be an unnecessary product in the first place since we can just design our application to not rely on the session. As I understand it the web was designed to be stateless i.e. each request is independent and all the information is contained within that request and the idea of the session was only something which was added in later on. How does the way we code change if we don't use the session? One thing we've often used the session for on projects that I've worked on is to store the current state of a form that the user is filling in. When they've completed the form then we would probably store some representation of what they've entered in a database. If we don't use the session then we need to store this intermediate data somewhere and include a key to load it in the request. On the project I'm working on at the moment we're storing that data in a database but then clearing out that data every other day since it's not needed once the user has completed the form. An alternative perhaps could be to store it in a cache since in reality all we have is a key/value pair which we need to keep for a relatively short amount of time. Advantages/disadvantages of this approach The disadvantage of this approach is that we have to make more reads and writes to the database to deal with this temporary data. Apart from the advantages I outlined initially, we are also more protected if a server handling a user's request goes down. If we were using the session to store intermediate state then that information would be lost and they would have to start over. In the approach we've using this isn't a problem and when the request is sent to another server we can still query the database and get whatever data the user had already saved. As with most things there's a trade off to be made but in this case it seems a fair one to me. Alternative approaches I've come across some alternative approaches where we avoid using the session but don't store intermediate state in a database. One way is to store that state in hidden fields on the form and another is to send it in the request parameters. Neither of these approaches seem particularly clean to me and they give the user an easier way to change the intermediate data in ways that the form might not allow them to do. From my experience our server side code becomes more complicated since we're always writing all of the data entered so far back into the page. In addition the url becomes a complete mess with the second approach. From http://www.markhneedham.com
February 17, 2010
by Mark Needham
· 23,799 Views · 1 Like
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Four Methods to Automate Development Environment Setup
There are at least four methods that can be used in different combinations to make the process of setting up a complete development environment a lot less painful.
February 16, 2010
by Mitch Pronschinske
· 31,823 Views
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How to Create a Java EE 6 Application with JSF 2, EJB 3.1, JPA, and NetBeans IDE 6.8
Develop a web-based app based on technologies in the JEE6 specs such as Enterprise Java Beans 3.1 and JPA with the help of NetBeans IDE 6.8.
December 29, 2009
by Christopher Lam
· 723,335 Views · 3 Likes
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Data-driven tests With JUnit 4 and Excel
One nice feature in JUnit 4 is that of Parameterized Tests, which let you do data-driven testing in JUnit with a minimum of fuss. It's easy enough, and very useful, to set up basic data-driven tests by defining your test data directly in your Java class. But what if you want to get your test data from somewhere else? In this article, we look at how to obtain test data from an Excel spreadsheet. Parameterized tests allow data-driven tests in JUnit. That is, rather than having different of test cases that explore various aspects of your class's (or your application's) behavior, you define sets of input parameters and expected results, and test how your application (or, more often, one particular component) behaves. Data-driven tests are great for applications involving calculations, for testing ranges, boundary conditions and corner cases. In JUnit, a typical parameterized test might look like this: @RunWith(Parameterized.class) public class PremiumTweetsServiceTest { private int numberOfTweets; private double expectedFee; @Parameters public static Collection data() { return Arrays.asList(new Object[][] { { 0, 0.00 }, { 50, 5.00 }, { 99, 9.90 }, { 100, 10.00 }, { 101, 10.08 }, { 200, 18}, { 499, 41.92 }, { 500, 42 }, { 501, 42.05 }, { 1000, 67 }, { 10000, 517 }, }); } public PremiumTweetsServiceTest(int numberOfTweets, double expectedFee) { super(); this.numberOfTweets = numberOfTweets; this.expectedFee = expectedFee; } @Test public void shouldCalculateCorrectFee() { PremiumTweetsService premiumTweetsService = new PremiumTweetsService(); double calculatedFees = premiumTweetsService.calculateFeesDue(numberOfTweets); assertThat(calculatedFees, is(expectedFee)); } } The test class has member variables that correspond to input values (numberOfTweets) and expected results (expectedFee). The @RunWith(Parameterzed.class) annotation gets JUnit to inject your test data into instances of your test class, via the constructor. The test data is provided by a method with the @Parameters annotation. This method needs to return a collection of arrays, but beyond that you can implement it however you want. In the above example, we just create an embedded array in the Java code. However, you can also get it from other sources. To illustrate this point, I wrote a simple class that reads in an Excel spreadsheet and provides the data in it in this form: @RunWith(Parameterized.class) public class DataDrivenTestsWithSpreadsheetTest { private double a; private double b; private double aTimesB; @Parameters public static Collection spreadsheetData() throws IOException { InputStream spreadsheet = new FileInputStream("src/test/resources/aTimesB.xls"); return new SpreadsheetData(spreadsheet).getData(); } public DataDrivenTestsWithSpreadsheetTest(double a, double b, double aTimesB) { super(); this.a = a; this.b = b; this.aTimesB = aTimesB; } @Test public void shouldCalculateATimesB() { double calculatedValue = a * b; assertThat(calculatedValue, is(aTimesB)); } } The Excel spreadsheet contains multiplication tables in three columns: The SpreadsheetData class uses the Apache POI project to load data from an Excel spreadsheet and transform it into a list of Object arrays compatible with the @Parameters annotation. I've placed the source code, complete with unit-test examples on BitBucket. For the curious, the SpreadsheetData class is shown here: public class SpreadsheetData { private transient Collection data = null; public SpreadsheetData(final InputStream excelInputStream) throws IOException { this.data = loadFromSpreadsheet(excelInputStream); } public Collection getData() { return data; } private Collection loadFromSpreadsheet(final InputStream excelFile) throws IOException { HSSFWorkbook workbook = new HSSFWorkbook(excelFile); data = new ArrayList(); Sheet sheet = workbook.getSheetAt(0); int numberOfColumns = countNonEmptyColumns(sheet); List rows = new ArrayList(); List rowData = new ArrayList(); for (Row row : sheet) { if (isEmpty(row)) { break; } else { rowData.clear(); for (int column = 0; column < numberOfColumns; column++) { Cell cell = row.getCell(column); rowData.add(objectFrom(workbook, cell)); } rows.add(rowData.toArray()); } } return rows; } private boolean isEmpty(final Row row) { Cell firstCell = row.getCell(0); boolean rowIsEmpty = (firstCell == null) || (firstCell.getCellType() == Cell.CELL_TYPE_BLANK); return rowIsEmpty; } /** * Count the number of columns, using the number of non-empty cells in the * first row. */ private int countNonEmptyColumns(final Sheet sheet) { Row firstRow = sheet.getRow(0); return firstEmptyCellPosition(firstRow); } private int firstEmptyCellPosition(final Row cells) { int columnCount = 0; for (Cell cell : cells) { if (cell.getCellType() == Cell.CELL_TYPE_BLANK) { break; } columnCount++; } return columnCount; } private Object objectFrom(final HSSFWorkbook workbook, final Cell cell) { Object cellValue = null; if (cell.getCellType() == Cell.CELL_TYPE_STRING) { cellValue = cell.getRichStringCellValue().getString(); } else if (cell.getCellType() == Cell.CELL_TYPE_NUMERIC) { cellValue = getNumericCellValue(cell); } else if (cell.getCellType() == Cell.CELL_TYPE_BOOLEAN) { cellValue = cell.getBooleanCellValue(); } else if (cell.getCellType() ==Cell.CELL_TYPE_FORMULA) { cellValue = evaluateCellFormula(workbook, cell); } return cellValue; } private Object getNumericCellValue(final Cell cell) { Object cellValue; if (DateUtil.isCellDateFormatted(cell)) { cellValue = new Date(cell.getDateCellValue().getTime()); } else { cellValue = cell.getNumericCellValue(); } return cellValue; } private Object evaluateCellFormula(final HSSFWorkbook workbook, final Cell cell) { FormulaEvaluator evaluator = workbook.getCreationHelper() .createFormulaEvaluator(); CellValue cellValue = evaluator.evaluate(cell); Object result = null; if (cellValue.getCellType() == Cell.CELL_TYPE_BOOLEAN) { result = cellValue.getBooleanValue(); } else if (cellValue.getCellType() == Cell.CELL_TYPE_NUMERIC) { result = cellValue.getNumberValue(); } else if (cellValue.getCellType() == Cell.CELL_TYPE_STRING) { result = cellValue.getStringValue(); } return result; } } Data-driven testing is a great way to test calculation-based applications more thoroughly. In a real-world application, this Excel spreadsheet could be provided by the client or the end-user with the business logic encoded within the spreadsheet. (The POI library handles numerical calculations just fine, though it seems to have a bit of trouble with calculations using dates). In this scenario, the Excel spreadsheet becomes part of your acceptance tests, and helps to define your requirements, allows effective test-driven development of the code itself, and also acts as part of your acceptance tests. From http://weblogs.java.net/blog/johnsmart
November 30, 2009
by John Ferguson Smart
· 43,586 Views · 1 Like
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Fill Data Into An XML Template With VTD-XML
This example shows you how to edit an XML template to fill in the data to generate an output XML file. /* This is the template */ /* Output XML file Empire Burlesque Bob Dylan USA Columbia 10.9 1985 Still Got the Blues Gary More UK Virgin Records 10.2 1990 */ import com.ximpleware.*; import java.io.*; public class editTemplate { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { VTDGen vg = new VTDGen(); FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream("new_cd.xml"); AutoPilot ap = new AutoPilot(); ap.selectXPath("/CATALOG/CD"); if (vg.parseFile("cd_Template.xml", false)) { VTDNav vn = vg.getNav(); ap.bind(vn); if (ap.evalXPath() == -1) { System.out.println("XPath eval failed"); System.exit(0); } fillTemplate(vn, "Empire Burlesque", "Bob Dylan", "USA", "Columbia", 10.90, 1985); if (ap.evalXPath() == -1) { System.out.println("XPath eval failed"); System.exit(0); } fillTemplate(vn, "Still Got the Blues", "Gary More", "UK", "Virgin Records", 10.20, 1990); // dump out the XML fos.write(vn.getXML().getBytes()); fos.close(); } } public static void fillTemplate(VTDNav vn, String title, String artist, String country, String company, double price, int year) throws NavException { int i = -1; if (vn.toElement(VTDNav.FIRST_CHILD)) { vn.overWrite(vn.getText(), title.getBytes()); vn.toElement(VTDNav.NEXT_SIBLING); vn.overWrite(vn.getText(), artist.getBytes()); vn.toElement(VTDNav.NEXT_SIBLING); vn.overWrite(vn.getText(), country.getBytes()); vn.toElement(VTDNav.NEXT_SIBLING); vn.overWrite(vn.getText(), company.getBytes()); vn.toElement(VTDNav.NEXT_SIBLING); vn.overWrite(vn.getText(), (price + "").getBytes()); vn.toElement(VTDNav.NEXT_SIBLING); vn.overWrite(vn.getText(), (year + "").getBytes()); } vn.toElement(VTDNav.PARENT); } }
November 30, 2009
by Jimmy Zhang
· 3,564 Views
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Fluent Navigation in JSF 2
In this article, the third in a series covering JavaServer Faces (JSF) 2.0 features contributed by Red Hat, or which Red Hat participated in extensively, you'll discover that getting around in a JSF 2 application is much simpler and requires less typing. With improved support for GET requests and bookmarkability, which the previous article covered, JSF 2 is decidely more nimble. But not at the cost of good design. JSF no longer has to encroach on your business objects by requiring action methods to return navigation outcomes, but can instead reflect on the state of the system when selecting a navigation case. This article should give you an appreciation for how intelligent the navigation system has become in JSF 2. Read the other parts in this article series: Part 1 - JSF 2: Seam's Other Avenue to Standardization Part 2 - JSF 2 GETs Bookmarkable URLs Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Three new navigation variants are going to be thrown at you in this article: implicit, conditional and preemptive. These new options are a sign that the JSF navigation system is becoming more adaptable to the real world. There's also a touch of developer convenience thrown in. Implicit navigation is particularly useful for developing application prototypes, where navigation rules just get in the way. This style of navigation interprets navigation outcomes as view IDs. As you move beyond prototyping, conditional navigation removes the coupling between the web and transactional tier because the navigation handler pulls information from your business components to select a navigation case. Preemptive navigation, which you were introduced to in the last article, can use either implicit navigation or declarative navigation rules to produce bookmarkable URLs at render time. Leveraging the navigation system to generate bookmarkable URLs allows JSF to add GET support while maintaining consistent, centralized navigation rules. Even with these new options, there's no telling what requirements your application might have for navigation. Thus, in JSF 2, you can finally query and modify the navigation cases; a new API has been introduced in JSF 2 that exposes the navigation rule set. Before we get into customizations, let's find out how these new variants make the navigation system more flexible and help prepare the user's next move. Hopefully you won't need those customizations after all. Flexible navigation choices The declarative navigation model in JSF was a move away from the explicit navigation "forward" selection by the action in Struts. Navigation transitions in JSF, which get matched based on current view ID, logical outcome and/or action expression signature, are described in the JSF descriptor (faces-config.xml) using XML-based rules. The matched transition indicates the next view to render and whether a client-side redirect should proceed rendering. Here's a typical example: /guess.xhtml #{numberGuessGame.guess} correct /gameover.xhtml While the JSF navigation model is clearer and arguably more flexible than in Struts, two fundamental problems remain. First, the action method is still required to return a navigation directive. The directive just happens to be a more "neutral" string outcome rather than an explicit type (i.e., ActionForward), but the coupling is just as tight and you loose type safety in the process, so is it really an improvement? The other issue is that you must define a navigation case to match that outcome, even in the simplest cases, which can be really tedious. So you can't make the argument that the navigation model is less obtrusive or more convenient. It's just stuck somewhere in between. To sum it up, the JSF navigation model is not flexible enough. It needs to accommodate different development styles better and it needs to be more self sufficient. On the one hand, your style or development phase may dictate waiving the declarative navigation rule abstraction. On the other hand, you may want to completely decouple your business objects from the navigation model, eradicating those arbitrary return value directives. JSF 2 gives you this broad range of options, and even let's you settle for a happy medium. The first option is provided by implicit navigation and the second conditional navigation. With implicit navigation, you can even use the current model without having to define the navigation rule right away. Let's unbox these two new alternatives, starting with implicit navigation. Implicit navigation JSF will post a form back to the current view (using the POST HTTP method) whenever the user performs an action, such a clicking a command button (hence the term "postback"). In the past, the only way to get JSF to advance to another view after the action is invoked (i.e., following the Invoke Application phase) was to define a navigation case in faces-config.xml. Navigation cases are matched based on the EL signature of the action method invoked and the method's return value converted to a string (the logical outcome). To cite an example, assume the user clicks on a button defined as follows: The preview() method on the bean named commandHandler returns a value to indicate the outcome of processing: public String preview() { // tidy, translate and/or validate comment return "success"; } These two criteria are joined in a navigation case that dictates which view is to be rendered next. /entry.xhtml #{commentHandler.preview} success /previewComment.xhtml If no navigation case can be matched, all JSF knows to do is render the current view again. So without a navigation case, there is no navigation. A quick shorthand, which is present in Seam, is to have the action method simply return the target view ID directly. In this case, you're effectively treating the logical outcome value as a view ID. This technique has been adopted in JSF 2 as implicit navigation. It's improved since Seam because you can choose to drop the view extension (e.g., .xhtml) and JSF will automatically add it back on for you when looking for a view ID. Therefore, it's no more invasive than the string outcome values you are currently returning. Implicit navigation comes into play when a navigation case cannot be matched using the existing mechanism. Here's how the logic outcome is processed in the implicit navigation case: Detect the presence of the ? character in the logical outcome If present, capture the query string parameters that follow it the ? character The special query string parameter faces-redirect=true indicates that this navigation should be issued using a client-side redirect If the logical outcome does not end with a file extension, append file extension of current view ID (e.g., .xhtml) If the logical outcome does not begin with a /, prepend the location of current view id (e.g., /, /admin/, etc.) Attempt to locate the template for the view ID If the template is found, create a virtual navigation case that targets the resolved view ID If the template is not found, skip implicit navigation Carry out the navigation case If the navigation case is not a redirect, build and render the target view in the same request If the navigation case is a redirect, build a redirect URL, appending the query string parameters captured earlier, then redirect to it Implicit navigation can be leveraged anywhere a logical outcome is interpreted. That includes: The return value of an action method The action attribute of a UICommand component (e.g., ) The outcome attribute of a UIOutcomeTarget (e.g., ) The handleNavigation() method of the NavigationHandler API Here's an example of the navigation to the preview comment view translated into implicit navigation. The return value is automatically decorated with a leading / and a trailing .xhtml. public String preview() { // tidy, translate and/or validate comment return "previewComment"; } The /previewComment.xhtml view will be rendered in the same request. If you want to redirect first, add the following flag in the query string of the return value: public String preview() { // tidy, translate and/or validate comment return "previewComment?faces-redirect=true"; } You can accomplish any navigation scenario using implicit navigation that you can today with a formal navigation case defined in faces-config.xml. Implicit navigation is designed as the fall-through case (after the explicit navigation rules are consulted). If it fails (i.e., the template cannot be located), and the JSF 2 ProjectStage is set to development, a FacesMessage is automatically generated to warn the developer of a possible programming error. Implicit navigation is great for prototyping and other rapid development scenarios. The major downside of implicit navigation is that you are further tying your business objects into the navigation model. Next we'll look conditional navigation, which provides an alternative that keeps your tiers loosely coupled. Conditional navigation Implicit navigation spotlights how invasive it is to put the onus on your business object to return a logic outcome just to make JSF navigation happy (and work). This coupling is especially problematic when you want to respond to user interface events using components in your business tier, a simplified architecture that is supported by both Seam and Java EE 6 to reduce the amount of glue code without increasing coupling. What would be more "logical" is to invert the control and have the navigation handler consult the state of the bean to determine which navigation case is appropriate. The navigation becomes contextual rather than static. That's what conditional navigation gives you. Conditional navigation introduces a condition as a new match criteria on the navigation case. It's defined in the element as a child of and expressed using an EL value expression. The value expression is evaluated each time the navigation case is considered. For any navigation case that matches, if a condition is defined, the condition must resolve to true for the navigation case to be considered a match. Here's an example of a conditional navigation case: #{registration.register} #{currentUser.registered} /account.xhtml As you can see, the condition doesn't necessarily have to reference a property on the bean that was invoked. It can be any state reachable by EL. Conditional navigation solves a secondary problem with the JSF navigation model, one of those little annoyances in JSF that was tedious to workaround. In JSF 1.2 and earlier, if your action method is a void method or returns a null value, interpreted in both cases as a null outcome, the navigation is skipped entirely. As a result, the current view is rendered again. The only workaround is to override the navigation handler implementation and change the behavior. That really throws a wrench in being able to cut the glue code between your UI and transactional tier. That changes with the introduction of conditional navigation. Since the condition provides either an alternative, or supplemental, match criteria to the logical outcome, navigation cases that have a condition are consulted even when the logical outcome is null or void. When the outcome is null, you can emulate switch statement to match a navigation case, switching on the condition criteria: #{identity.login} #{currentUser.admin} /admin/home.xhtml #{identity.login} #{currentUser.vendor} /vendor/home.xhtml #{identity.login} #{currentUser.client} /client/home.xhtml If you intend to simply match the null outcome in any case, you can use a condition that is verily true (which, admittedly, could be improved in JSF 2.1): #{identity.logout} #{true} /home.xhtml You can also use this fixed condition to provide a fall-through case. But wait, there's more! Having to itemize all the possible routes using individual navigation cases causes death by XML (a quite painful death). What if you wanted to delegate the decision to a navigation helper bean or involve a scripting language? There's good news. You can! The target view ID can be resolved from an EL value expression. Let's return to the login example and use a helper bean to route the user using one navigation case: #{identity.login} #{navigationHelper.userHomeViewId} Oh my goodness, how much nicer is that? The navigation helper can encapsulate the logic of inspecting the currentUser bean and determining the correct target view ID. In this section, we looked at two additional ways a navigation case is matched, increasing the overall flexibility of the navigation model. Implicit navigation maps logical outcomes directly to view IDs and conditional navigation reflects on contextual data to select a navigation case without imposing unnecessary coupling with the transactional tier. We're still looking at the same fundamental navigation model, though. In the next section, you'll see the navigation model used in a new role, and in a new place in the JSF life cycle, to generate bookmarkable links. Anticipating the user's next move Up to this point, the navigation handler only comes into play on a postback. Since user interface events trigger a "postback" to the current view, as mentioned earlier, the navigation handler kicks in after the Invoke Application phase to route the user to the next view. JSF 2 introduces a completely new use of the navigation handler by evaluating the navigation rules during the Render Response phase. This render-time evaluation is known as preemptive (or predetermined) navigation. Preemptive navigation The spec defines preemptive navigation as a mechanism for determining the target URL at Render Response, typically for a hyperlink component. The current view ID and specified outcome are used to determine the target view ID, which is then translated into a bookmarkable URL and used as the hyperlink's target. This process happens, of course, before the user has activated the component (i.e., click on the hyperlink). In fact, the user may never activate the component. The idea is to marry the declarative (or implicit) navigation model with the support for generating bookmarkable links. Based on what was just described, you should now understand why you declare the target view ID in an attribute named outcome on the new bookmarkable component tags (and why those components inherit from a component class named UIOutcomeTarget). You are not targeting a view ID directly, but rather a navigation outcome which may be interpreted as a view ID if the matching falls through to implicit navigation. Let's consider an example. Assume that you want to create a link to the home page of the application. You could define the link using one the new bookmarkable link component: This definition would match the following navigation case if it existed: * home /home.xhtml Of course, with implicit navigation available, this navigation case would be redundant. We could exclude it and the result would be the same. Home But if the target view ID depends on the context, such as the user's credentials, you might choose to reintroduce the navigation case to leverage conditional logic as we did earlier. In either case, the key is that the target view ID is not hard-coded in the template. As it turns out, you've already been using preemptive navigation when you explored bookmarkability in the last article. But there's a critical part of preemptive navigation that we haven't yet fully explored: the assembly of the query string. As it turns out, this topic also applies to redirect navigation rules. In a sense, preemptive navigation has the same semantics as redirect navigation rules because both produces URL that lead to a non-faces request. The only difference is that a bookmarkable URL is a deferred request, whereas a redirect happens immediately. In both cases, the payload in the query string is an essential part of the URLs identity. Building the query string As a result of the new GET support in JSF 2, there are now a plethora of ways to tack on values to the query string. Options can collide when heading into the navigation funnel. What comes out on the other side? There's a simple conflict resolution algorithm to find out. Each parameter source is given a precedence. When a conflict occurs, meaning two sources define the same parameter name, the parameter from the source with the highest precedence is used. The query string parameters are sourced using the following order of precedence, from highest to lowest: Implicit query string parameter (e.g., /blog.xhtml?id=3) View parameter (defined in the of the target view ID) Nested in UIOutcomeTarget (e.g., ) or UICommand component (e.g., ) Nested within the navigation case element in faces-config.xml Granted, this appears to be a lot of options. Don't worry, we'll walk you through the cases in which you would use each option in this article. We recommend you choose a single style of providing navigation parameters that best suits your architecture and keep the others in the back of your mind, so that when an edge case comes up, you can tap into their power. In the last article, you learned that you can use view parameters to let JSF manage the query string for you. Instead of using view parameters, you could just tack on the query string yourself when building a link to a blog entry. You could even abstract the parameter away from the view and define it in the navigation case instead, but it again it presents a challenge to tooling: permalink /entry.xhtml?id=#{blog.entryId} A nested would also work here, especially if you want to centralized your parameters. In terms of navigation, the most important point to emphasize here is that you can finally add query string parameters to a redirect URL in the navigation rules. This need likely appears in your existing applications. No longer do you have to resort to using the programmatic API to issue a redirect with a query string payload. Let's consider the case of posting a comment to an entry. This example demonstrates the case when you are submitting a form and want to redirect to a bookmarkable page which displays the result of submitting the form: #{commentHandler.post} /entry.xhtml id #{blog.entryId} Note: Don't confuse with a UIViewParameter. Think of it more as a redirect parameter (the tag should probably be called not , something to address in JSF 2.1). There are now plenty of options to pass the user along with the right information. But the spec can't cover everything. That's why you can now query the navigation rule base at runtime to do with it what you like. Peeking into the navigation cases You've now seen a number of ways in which the navigation cases themselves have become more dynamic. Regardless of how dynamic they are, the fact remains that once you ship the application off for deployment, the navigation cases that you defined in faces-config.xml are set in stone. That's no longer the case in JSF 2. A new navigation handler interface, named ConfigurableNavigationhandler, has been introduced that allows you to query and make live modifications to the registered NavigationCase objects. Not that you necessarily want to make changes in production. Having a configurable navigation rule set means that you can incorporate a custom configuration scheme such as a DSL or even a fluent, type-safe navigation model from which rules can be discovered at deployment time. In short, the navigation rule set is pluggable, and it's up to you what to plug into it. NavigationCase is the model that represents a navigation case in the JSF API. When JSF starts up, the navigation cases are read from the JSF descriptor, encapsulated into NavigationCase objects and registered with the ConfigurableNavigationHandler. You can retrieve one of the registered NavigationCase objects by the action expression signature and logical outcome under which it is registered. NavigationCase case = navigationHandler.getNavigationCase( facesContext, "#{commandBoard.post}", "success"); You can also access the complete navigation rule set as a Map>, where the keys are the values. Map> cases = navigationHandler.getNavigationCases(); You can use this map to register your own navigation cases dynamically. For example, a framework might read an alternative navigation descriptor (such as Seam's pages descriptor) and contribute additional navigation cases. With an individual NavigationCase object in hand, you can either read its properties or use it to create an action or redirect URL, perhaps to feed into your own navigation handler. There are a lot of possiblities here. The slightly awkward part is how you reference this new API (ConfigurableNavigationHandler). The default NavigationHandler implementation in a standard JSF implementation must implement this interface. But you still have to cast to it when you retrieve it from the Application object, as follows: ConfigurableNavigationHandler nh = (ConfigurableNavigationHandler) FacesContext.getCurrentInstance() .getApplication().getNavigationHandler(); Obviously, something to revisit in JSF 2.1. Once you get a handle on it, the navigation model is your oyster. You can define new ways to navigate or use it to generate bookmarkable URLs in your own style. Forging ahead The JSF navigation model had the right idea in spirit, but lacked a couple of elements that would allow it to truly realize loose coupling, it's required use slowed down prototyping, and you had no control to query or modify the navigation rule set at runtime. Your going to find that in JSF 2, the navigation system is much more flexible. You could argue that it finally accomplishes its original goals. For prototype applications, you can get navigation working without touching the faces-config.xml descriptor with implicit navigation. Just use a view ID, with or without an extension, as the logical outcome and away you go. As the application matures, you can establish a clean separation between JSF and your transactional tier by using conditional navigation to select a navigation case. You can trim the number of navigation cases by defining the target view ID as a value expression and having JSF resolve the target view ID from a navigation helper bean. If the design of your application calls for bookmarkable support, you can leverage the navigation handler in its new role to produce bookmarkable URLs at render time. In JSF 2, it's a lot easier to route the user around the application. While that may be good for some applications, other applications never advance the user beyond a single page. These single page applications transform in place using Ajax and partial page updates. The next article in this series will open your eyes to how well Ajax and JSF fit together, and what new Ajax innovations made their way into the spec.
November 2, 2009
by Dan Allen
· 139,590 Views · 2 Likes
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JSF 2 GETs Bookmarkable URLs
JSR-314: JavaServer Faces (JSF) 2.0 demonstrates a strong evolution of the JSF framework driven by de facto standards that emerged out of the JSF community and participating vendor's products. This article, the second installment in covering JSF 2.0 features contributed by Red Hat, or which Red Hat participated in extensively, covers the new features that bring formalized GET support to a framework traditionally rooted in POST requests. The primary building blocks of this support are view parameters and a pair of UI components that produce bookmarkable hyperlinks. Both features incubated in Seam and, therefore, should be familiar to any Seam developer. They are also features for which the JSF community has passionately pleaded. Author's Note: Many thanks to Pete Muir, who played a pivotal role as technical editor of this series. Read the other parts in this article series: Part 1 - JSF 2: Seam's Other Avenue to Standardization Part 2 - JSF 2 GETs Bookmarkable URLs Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Every user session must start somewhere. JSF was designed with the expectation that the user always begins on a launch view. This view captures initial state and allows the user to indicate which action to invoke by triggering a UI event, such as clicking a button. For instance, to view a mortgage loan, the user might enter its id into a text box and then click the "Lookup" button. The assumption that this scenario is the norm is surprising since it overlooks that fact that the web was founded on the concept of a hyperlink. A hyperlink points to a resource (URI), which may already contain the original state and intent, such as to view a mortgage loan summary. There's no need to bother the user with a launch view in this case. While hyperlinks are most often used in web sites, they apply to web applications as well (see this blog entry for a discussion about the difference between a web site and a web application). Hyperlinks support reuse by serving as an exchange language in composite applications. One application can link to a resource in another application in lieu of having to duplicate its functionality. In fact, the request may be coming from a legacy application that isn't even web-based. In that case, you'll likely be plopping the user into the web application somewhere in the middle. As it turns out, this situation is quite common. When you visit a blog, do you start on the search screen to find an entry to read? Not likely. More times than not, you click on a link to view a specific blog entry. The point to take away from this discussion is that initial requests (referred to as non-faces requests in JSF) can be just as important as form submissions (faces requests), whether in a web site or web application. In the past, JSF has struggled to support the scenario cited above, placing much more emphasize on faces requests. JSF 2 rectifies this imbalance by introducing view parameters and hyperlink-producing UI components. View parameters allow the application to respond to a resource request by baking formal processing of request parameters into the JSF life cycle for both GET and POST requests. View parameters are not limited to consuming data. They are bi-directional. JSF 2 can propagate the data captured by view parameters when generating bookmarkable URLs, with complementary behavior for redirect URLs produced by redirect navigation cases. We'll start by examining view parameters, how they are defined and how they are worked into the JSF life cycle. You'll then discover how they work in tandem with the new hyperlink-producing components and the navigation handler to bring "bookmarkable" support to JSF. Introducing view parameters The API documentation describes a view parameter, represented by the javax.faces.component.UIViewParameter component class, as a declarative binding between a request parameter and a model property. The binding to the model property is expressed using an EL value expression (e.g., #{blog.entryId}). If the expression is omitted, the request parameter is bound instead to a request-scoped variable with the same name. Here's a simple example of a view parameter that maps the value of a request parameter named id to the JavaBean-style property named entryId on a managed bean named blog. Assuming the entryId property on the blog managed bean is of type long, a value of 9 will be assigned to the property when the following URL is requested: http://domain/blog/entry.jsf?id=9 But wait, there's more! The value of the request parameter is first converted and validated before being assigned to the model property. This behavior should sound familiar. That's because it mirrors the processing of form input bindings on a faces request. In a way, view parameters turn the query string into an alternative form submission. And like form inputs, view parameters are also processed during faces requests. The complete view parameter life cycle is covered later when we look at view parameter propagation Before going any further, it's important to point out that view parameters are only available when using the new View Declaration Language (VDL), a standardized version of Facelets. The primary reason is because the JSR-314 EG agreed that no new features should be made to support JSP since it's deprecated as a view handler in JSF 2. Perhaps you are thinking... Isn't this already possible? If you are savvy JSF developer, you're perhaps aware that it's already possible to map a request parameter value to a model property. The assignment is declared by referencing an element of the #{param} map in a element of a managed bean declaration. For instance, you could alternatively map the id request parameter to the blog managed bean in faces-config.xml as follows: blog com.acme.Blog entryId #{param['id']} The similiarities end there. View parameters go above and beyond this simple assignment by providing: View-oriented granularity (the property mapping in the managed bean definition is global to the application) Custom converters and/or validators (along with failure messages) Bi-directionality It's hard to say which feature is the most important, but bi-directionality is certainly the most unique. Since view parameters are a mapping to a JavaBean-style property, the value can be read from the property and propagated to the next request using either the query string or the UI component tree state (depending on the type of request). You are going to find out how useful this bi-directionality can be later on in the article. Suffice to say, while the property mapping in the managed bean definition works, it's pretty anemic. View parameters are far more adequate and robust in contrast. Pertaining to the topic in this article, view parameters are the key to bringing bookmarkable support to JSF. And since bookmarks link to specific views, so must view parameters. It's all in the view As you may have guessed, view parameters are view-oriented. That means they somehow need to be associated with one or more views (as opposed to being linked to a managed bean, for instance). Up to this point, however, there was no facility for associating extensible, non-rendering metadata with a JSF view. So the EG first had to find a place within the UI component tree to stick metadata like view parameters. That led to the introduction of the metadata facet of UIViewRoot. The next section will introduce this new facet and how it's used to host view parameters for a particular view, or even a set of views. Then we get into how view parameters get processed in the JSF life cycle. The view metadata facet View parameters provide information about how request parameters should be handled when a view is either requested or linked to. The view parameters are not rendered themselves. Therefore, we say that they are part of the view's metamodel and described using metadata. So the question is, "Where should this metadata live?" It turns out that a JSF view, which is represented at the root by the javax.faces.component.UIViewRoot component class, already accommodates some metadata. Currently, this metadata consists of string values to define settings such as the locale, render kit, and content type of the view, and method expressions that designate view-specific phase observers. For example: ... While values can be assigned to these metadata properties explicitly in Java code, more often they are assigned declaratively using corresponding attributes of the component tag. But neither UIViewRoot or it's component tag can accommodate complex metadata--that is, metadata which cannot be described by a single attribute. That's were the view metadata facet comes in. The view metadata facet is a reserved facet of UIViewRoot, named javax_faces_metadata, that can hold an arbitrarily complex branch of UI components that provide additional metadata for a view. Facets are special because they are ignored by a UI component tree traversal, requiring an imperative request to step into one of them. This aspect makes a facet an ideal candidate for tucking away some metadata for the view that can be accessed on demand. The view metadata facet looks like any other facet in the UI component tree. It must be declared as a direct descendant of within a view template as follows: ... ... Note: If you are using Facelets, you may not be familiar with the tag since it's optional in Facelets. When you add it to your template, it must be the outer-most component tag, but it does not have to be the root of the document. Since the view metadata facet is a built-in facet, and is expected to be heavily used, the alias tag was introduced as a shorthand for the formal facet definition shown above: ... ... We now have a place in the UI component tree to store metadata pertaining to the view. But why define the metadata in the view template? It's all about reuse and consistency. Describing view metadata with UI components There are two important benefits to defining the metadata within the view template. First, it circumvents introducing yet another XML file with its own schema that developers would have to learn. More importantly, it allows us to reuse the UI component infrastructure to define behavior, such as registering a custom converter or validator, or to extract common view parameters into an include template. Since we're using UI components to describe the view metadata, then it makes sense to treat the UIViewParameter like any other input component. In fact, it extends UIInput. That allows us to register custom converters and validators on a UIViewParameter without any special reservations. Here's an example: Note: Later in this series you'll learn that like input components, view parameters can enforce constraints defined by Bean Validation annotations (or XML), making the explicit validation tags such as this unnecessary. But there is one caveat to embedding the view metadata in the template. Without special provisions, extracting the metadata would require building the entire view (i.e., UI component tree). Not only would this be expensive and unnecessary if the intent is not to render the view, it could also have side effects. When the component tree is built, value expressions in Facelets tag handlers get evaluated, potentially altering the state of the system. To prevent these counteractions, the view metadata facet is given special treatment in the specification. Specifically, it must be possible to be extract and built it separately from the rest of the component tree. Earlier, I mentioned that view parameters are only available in Facelets, and not JSP, because of an executive decision. There's also a technical reason why view parameters rely on Facelets. Only Facelets can provide the necessary separation between template parsing and component tree construction that allows a template fragment to be processed in isolation. The result of this operation is a genuine UI component tree, represented by UIViewRoot, that contains only the view metadata facet and its children. For all intents and purposes, it's as though the view template only contained this one child element. Using the following logic, it's possible to retrieve the metadata for an arbitrary view at any point in time. This data mining will come in to play later when we talk about view parameter propagation. String viewId = "/your_view_id.xhtml" FacesContext ctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); ViewDeclarationLanguage vdl = ctx.getApplication().getViewHandler() .getViewDeclarationLanguage(ctx, viewId); ViewMetadata viewMetadata = vdl.getViewMetadata(ctx, viewId); UIViewRoot viewRoot = viewMetadata.createMetadataView(ctx); UIComponent metadataFacet = viewRoot.getFacet(UIViewRoot.METADATA_FACET_NAME); At this point you could retrieve the UIViewParameter components, which are children of the facet, to perhaps access the view parameter mappings. More likely, though, you'll be looking for your own custom components so you can execute custom behavior before the view is rendered (e.g., view actions). The extraction of the view metadata is very clever because, while it only builds a partial view, it still honors Facelets compositions. That means you can put your metadata into a common template and include it. Using some creative arrangement, you can apply common metadata to a pattern of views. Here's an example: ... ... You've learned that defining a view metadata facet provides the following services for JSF: Arbitrarily complex metadata, which can reuse existing component infrastructure Metadata is kept with the view, or in a shared template, instead of in an external XML file Can be extracted and processed without any side effects (idempotent) Common metadata declarations can be shared across multiple views Now that you are well versed in the view metadata facet, it's time to work out a concrete example of view parameters in practice. We'll look at how to enforce preconditions and load data on an initial request using information from the query string. Then you'll learn how that information gets propagated as the user navigates to other views. Weaving parameters into the life cycle This article has alluded several times to the use case of loading a blog entry from a URL by passing the value of the id parameter to our managed bean on an initial request. Let's allow this scenario to play out. Here's the URL the user might request coming into the site: http://domain/blog/entry.jsf?id=9 We'll start by asking what we do with the value once it is assigned to the entryId property of the blog managed bean. One approach is to load the entry lazily as soon as it's referenced in the UI. #{blog.blogEntry.title} #{blog.blogEntry.content} Here's what the managed bean would look like to support this approach: @ManagedBean(name = "blog") public class Blog { private Long entryId; private BlogEntry blogEntry; public Long getEntryId() { return entryId; } public void setEntryId(Long entryId) { this.entryId = entryId; } public BlogEntry getBlogEntry() { if (blogEntry == null) { blogEntry = blogRepository.findEntry(entryId); } return blogEntry; } } Of course, it doesn't make any sense to display an entry without an id (and could even lead to a NullPointerException). So we should really make the id request parameter required. We'll also add a message if it is missing. ... In the case a required request parameter is missing, you can display the error message using the tag. Conversion and validation failures are recorded as global messages since there's no view element with which to associate. But these preconditions still don't stop the view from being rendered if a request parameter is missing or invalid. What we need is a way to execute an initialization method that parallels an action invocation on a postback. That would allow us to get everything sorted before the user sees a response. View initialization While view parameters provide the processing steps from retrieving the request value to updating the model, they do not furnish the action invocation and navigation steps that are part of the faces request life cyle. That means you have to fall back to lazy loading the data as the view is being rendered (i.e., encoded). You are also missing a definitive point to fine tune the UI component tree programmatically before it's encoded. Fortunately, another new feature in JSF 2, system events, makes it possible to perform a series of initialization steps before view rendering begins. Systems events notify registered listeners of interesting transition points in the JSF life cycle at a much finer-grained level than phase listeners. In particular, we are interested in the PreRenderViewEvent, which is fired immediately after the component tree is built (but not yet rendered). If the word "registered" evokes dreadful memories of XML descriptors, fear not. Observing the event we are interested in is just a matter of appending one or more elements to the view metadata facet. The tag has two required attributes, type and listener. The type attribute is the name of the event to observe derived by removing the Event suffix from the end of the event class name and decaptializing the result. We are only interested in one event, preRenderView. The listener attribute is a method binding expression pointing to either a no-arguments method or a method that accepts a SystemEvent. ... We can use this method to retrieve the blog entry before the view is rendered. public void loadEntry() { blogEntry = blogRepository.findEntry(entryId); } If the entry cannot be found, you could add conditional logic to the view to display an error message: The blog entry you requested does not exist. Ideally, it would be better not to display the view at all. You can force a navigation to occur using the NavigationHandler API. public void loadEntry() { try { blogEntry = blogRepository.findEntry(entryId); } catch (NoSuchEntryException e) { FacesContext ctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); ctx.getApplication().getNavigationHandler() .handleNavigation(ctx, "#{blog.loadEntry}", "invalid"); } } The only problem is that the listener method is going to be invoked even if the view parameter could not be successfully converted, validated and assigned to the model property. Once again, there's a JSF 2 feature to the rescue. You can use the new isValidationFailed() method on FacesContext to check whether a conversion or validation failure occurred while processing the view parameters. public void loadEntry() { FacesContext ctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); if (ctx.isValidationFailed()) { ctx.getApplication().getNavigationHandler() .handleNavigation(ctx, "#{blog.loadEntry}", "invalid"); return; } // load entry } So far we have dealt with a trivial string to long conversion. But view parameters allow you to represent more complex data, as long as you have a converter that can marshal the value from (and to) a string. Let's assume that we want to allow the user to look at blog entries that fall within a range of dates. The before and after dates can be encoded into the URL as follows: /entries.jsf?after=2007-12-31&before=2009-01-01 Those values can then be converted to Date objects using the converter tag and assigned to Date properties on a managed bean as follows: We again use a PreRenderViewEvent listener to load the data before the page is rendered, in this case filtering the collection of blog entries to be displayed. Emulating the behavior of an action-oriented framework, which the previous examples have demonstrated, is one use of the PreRenderViewEvent. Another is to act as a life cycle callback for programmatically creating or tweaking the UI component tree after it is "inflated" from the view template. Perhaps you want to build part of the tree dynamically from a data structure. Accomplishing this in JSF would require "binding" a bean property to an existing UI component, declared using an EL value expression in the binding attribute of the tag. But this approach is really ugly because you have to put the tree-appending logic in either the JavaBean property getter or setter, depending on whether the view is being created or restored. The PreRenderViewEvent offers a much more definitive and self-documentating hook. As you've seen, it's finally possible to respond to a bookmarkable URL in JSF (without pain or brittle code). But, up to this point, all we've done is take, take, take. For bookmarkable support to be complete, we need to be able to create bookmarkable URLs. That brings us to the topic of parameter propagation. Push the parameters on If view parameters were only capable of accepting data sent through the query string of the URL, even considering the built-in conversion and validation they provide, they really wouldn't be all that helpful. What makes them so compelling is that they are bi-directional, meaning they are also propagated to subsequent requests, and rather transparently. The subsequent request may be a faces request, which targets the current view, or a non-faces request to a view that has view parameters, which translates into a bookmarkable URL. A request for a bookmarkable URL can come from either a link in the page or a redirect navigation event. We'll look at how view parameters get propagated in all of these cases in this section. Saved by the component tree Let's return to the blog entry view and consider what happens if we have a comment form below the post. The comment form might be defined as follows: Notice that there is no reference to the id of the blog entry in this form. Assuming that the blog entry is not stored in session scope (or a third-party conversation), how will the handler know which entry the comment should be linked? This is where view parameter propagation blends with component tree state saving. When encoding of the view (i.e., rendering) is complete, the view parameter values are tucked away in the saved state of the UI component tree. When the component tree is restored on a postback, such as when the comment form is submitted, the saved view parameter values are applied to the model. This allows view parameters to tie in nicely with the existing design of JSF. The initial state supplied to the view parameters by the URL can be maintained as long as the user interacts with the view (e.g., triggers faces requests through user interface events). You can think of view parameters as an elegant replacement for hidden form fields in this case. If the user bookmarked the URL after posting a comment, however, the reference to the blog entry would be lost. That's because after a POST request, the browser location does not contain a query string. Here's what the user would see: http://domain/blog/entry.jsf If we are following best practices, we'll want to implement the Post/Redirect/Get pattern anyway. That gives us a opportunity to repopulate the query string of the URL. In the past, this would have required an explicit call to the redirect() method of ExternalContext inside the action method. FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().redirect("/entry.jsf?id=" + blog.getEntryId()); This explicit (and intrusive) call was necessary because the navigation case did not provide any way to append parameters to the query string. Now, view parameters can take care of this for us. We can tell JSF to encode the view parameters of the target view ID into the redirect URL by enabling the include-redirect-params attribute on the element. /entry.xhtml #{commentHandler.post} #{view.viewId} We'll get into navigation more in the next article in this series. Let's talk about those regular old hyperlinks in the page. We want those to be bookmarkable as well. That means the state needs to be encoded into the URL they point to. Once again, view parameters come into play. Bookmarkable links Let's now assume we want to create a bookmarkable link (permalink) to the current blog entry. You can link directly to another JSF view using the outcome attribute of the new hyperlink-producing component tags, and . These component tags are represented by the component class javax.faces.component.UIOutcomeTarget. (The reason the attribute is named outcome and not viewId will be explained in the next article. For now, just know that the value of the outcome attribute can be a view ID). Both of these component tags support encoding the view parameters into the query string of the URL as signaled by the includeViewParams attribute. Here's how the permalink is defined: The default value of includeViewParams is false. Since it's set to true, the view parameters are read in reverse and appended to the query string of the link. Here's the HTML that this component tag generated, assuming an entry id of 9: Permalink The link is produced using the new getBookmarkableURL() method on the ViewHandler API. This method calls through to the encodeBookmarkableURL() on the ExternalContext API to have the session ID token tacked on, if necessary. These methods complement the getRedirectURL() and encodeRedirectURL() methods on ViewHandler and ExternalContext, respectively. In a servlet environment, the implementations happen to be the same, but the extra methods serve as both a statement of intent and an extension point for environments where a link URL and a redirect URL are handled differently, such as a portlet. Notice that the context path of the application (/blog) is prepended to the path, the extension is changed from the view suffix (.xhtml) to the JSF servlet mapping (.jsf) and the query string contains the name and value of the view parameter read from the model. If you had used an tag, you would have had to do all of these things manually. That's exactly why the EG felt it was necessary to introduce this component. We can do one better. If the outcome attribute is absent, the current view ID is assumed. So we can shorten the tag to this: If you want the link to appear as a button, you can use the component tag instead. However, note that JavaScript is required in this case to update the browser location when the button is clicked, as you can see from the generated HTML: Permalink View parameters come in especially handy when the number of parameters to keep track of increases. For instance, let's consider the case when a user is searching for entries using a query string in a particular category and wants to paginate through the results. In this case, we are dealing with at least three parameters: Yet the link to these search results still remains as simple as the permalink to an entry: This component tag will produce HTML similar to this: Refresh What if we want to link back to the previous page? In that case, we cannot allow the view parameter named page be automatically written into the query string since that will just link us to the current page. We need an override. Fortunately, it's easy to override an encoded view parameter. You simply use the standard tag, just as you would if you were defining a new query string parameter: View parameters that are encoded into links to the current view ID are pretty intuitive. Where things get tricky is when we use view parameters on a link to a different view ID. This requires putting on your thinking cap and doing some reasoning. View parameter handoff When a request is made for a URL, and in turn a JSF view ID, the view parameters defined in that view are used to map request parameters to model properties. But when the view parameters are encoded into a bookmarkable URL, the mappings are read from the target view ID. That's why it's especially important to be able to extract the view metadata from a template without having building a full component tree, as mentioned earlier. Otherwise, you would end up building a component tree for every view that is linked to in the current view. That would be very costly. Let's consider a use case. Suppose that we want to create a link from the search results to a single entry. We would define the link as follows: #{_entry.title} #{_entry.excerpt} The question to ask yourself is this. "Are the search string, category and page offset included in the URL for the entry?". I hope you said "No". The reason is because when the URL for the entry link is built, the component tag reads the view parameter mappings defined in the /entry.xhtml template. The only parameter mapped in that template is entry id. In order to preserve the filter vector, the view parameters defined in the /entries.xhtml view need to also be in the /entry.xhtml template. Aha! Since these are shared view parameters, we should define them in a common template: We can then include that template in each view that needs to preserve these view parameters: ... Keep in mind that if the user navigates to the entry after performing a search, the URL for the entry shown in the browser's location bar will now contain the filter vector. But if you want the user to be able to return to the search filter (without using the back button), that's what you want. You can always provide a simple permalink to bookmark just the entry. Even though you are now defining view parameters in each of the views, that doesn't mean the URL will become littered with empty query string parameters when they are not in use. View parameters are only encoded (i.e., added to the query string) if the value is not null. Otherwise, there is no trace of the view parameter. You have now learned how view parameters are propagated during a postback, on a redirect and into a bookmarkable URL. The main benefit of this process is that it is transparent. You don't have to worry about each and every request parameter that comprises the state in the query string of the URL. Instead, JSF interprets the view parameter metadata defined in the template of the target view and automatically appends those name/value pairs to the URL when you activate this feature. Bookmark it View parameters serve as an alternative to storing state in the UI component tree, provide a starting point for the application, help integrate with legacy applications, assert preconditions of views, make views bookmarkable, and, with help of the new UIOutcomeTarget components or the enhancement to the redirect navigation case, produce links to those bookmarkable views. This article began by introducing you to the view metadata facet, which is a general facility for defining a view's metamodel that reuses the existing UI component infrastructure. You learned that view parameters and PreRenderViewEvent listeners are the first standard implementations of view metadata. You saw how the combination of these two features allow you to capture initial state from URL query string, validate preconditions and load data for a view all before the view is rendered. Finally, you learned how view parameter values are propagated to subsequent requests. This series continues by taking a deeper look at the navigation enhancements made in JSF 2 and explaining how those changes tie into the bookmarkability that you learned about in this article. So bookmark and check back again soon!
October 29, 2009
by Dan Allen
· 103,314 Views
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Understanding the NHibernate Type System
This article is taken from NHibernate in Action from Manning Publications. This article delves into the NHibernate type system. For the table of contents, the Author Forum, and other resources, go to http://www.manning.com/kuate/. It is being reproduced here by permission from Manning Publications. Manning ebooks are sold exclusively through Manning. Visit the book's page for more information. Softbound print: February 2009 | 400 pages ISBN: 1932394923 Use code "dzone30" to get 30% off any version of this book. Entities are the coarse-grained classes in a system. You usually define the features of a system in terms of the entities involved: “the user places a bid for an item” is a typical feature definition that mentions three entities - user, bid and item. In contrast, value types are the much more fine grained classes in a system, such as strings, numbers, dates and monetary amounts. These fine grained classes can be used in many places and serve many purposes; the value type string can store email address, usernames and many other things. Strings are simple value types, but it is possible (but less common) to create value types that are more complex. For example, a value type could contain several fields, like an Address. So how do we differentiate between value types and entities? From a more formal standpoint, we an say an entity is any class whose instances have their own persistent identity, and a value type is a class who’s instances do not. The entity instances may therefore be in any of the three persistent lifecycle states: transient, detached, or persistent. However, we don’t consider these lifecycle states to apply to the simpler value type instances. Furthermore, because entities have their own lifecycle, the Save() and Delete() methods of the NHibernate ISession interface will apply to them, but never to value type instances. To illustrate, lets consider Figure A. Figure A – An order entity with TotalAmount value type TotalAmount is an instance of value type Money. Because value types are completely bound to that their owning entities, TotalAmount is only saved when the Order is saved. Associations and Value Types As we said, not all value types are simple. It’s possible for value types to also define associations. For example, our Money value type could have a property called Currency that is an association to a Currency entity as shown in figure 6.1.2 Figure B – The Money value type with association to a Currency entity. If your value types have associations, they must always point to entities. The reason is that, if those associations could point from entities to value types, a value type could potentially belong to several entities, which isn’t desirable. This is one of the great things about value types; if you update a value type instance, you know that it only affects the entity that owns it. For example, changing the TotalAmount of one Order simply cannot accidentally affect others. So far we’ve talked about value types and entities from an object oriented perspective. To build a more complete picture, we shall now take a look at how the relational model sees value types and entities, and how NHibernate bridges the gap. Bridging from objects to database You may be aware that a database architect would see the world of value types and entities slightly differently to this object oriented view of things. In the database, tables represent the entities, and columns represent the values. Even join tables and lookup tables are entities. So, if all tables represent entities in the database, does that mean we have to map all tables to entities in our .NET domain model? What about those value types we wanted in our model? NHibernate provides constructs for dealing with this. For example, a many-to-many association mapping hides the intermediate association table from the application, so we don’t end up with an unwanted entity in our domain model. Similarly, a collection of value typed strings behaves like a value type from the point of view of the .NET domain model even though it’s mapped to its own table in the database. These features have their uses and can often simplify your C# code. However, over time we have become suspicious of them; these “hidden” entities often end up needing exposure in our applications as business requirements evolve. The many-to-many association table, for example, often has additional columns added as the application matures, so the relationship itself becomes an entity. You might not go far wrong if you make every database-level entity be exposed to the application as an entity class. For example, we’d be inclined to model the many-to-many association as two one-to-many associations to an intervening entity class. We’ll leave the final decision to you, and return to the topic of many-to-many entity associations later in this chapter. Mapping types So far we’ve discussed the differences between value types and entities, as seen from the object oriented and relational database perspectives. We know that mapping entities is quite straight forward – entity classes are simply always mapped to database tables using , , and mapping elements. Value types need something more, which is where mapping types enter the picture. Consider this mapping of the CaveatEmptor User and email address: In ORM, you have to worry about both .NET types and SQL data types. In the example above imagine that the Email field is a .NET string, and EMAIL column is an SQL varchar. We want to tell NHibernate know how to carry out this conversion, which is where NHibernate mapping types come in. In this case, we’ve specified the mapping type "String", which we know is appropriate for this particular conversion. The String mapping type isn’t the only one built into NHibernate; NHibernate comes with various mapping types that define default persistence strategies for primitive .NET types and certain classes, such as like DateTime. Built-in mapping types NHibernate’s built-in mapping types usually reflect the name of the .NET type they map. Sometimes you’ll have a choice of mapping types available to map a particular .NET type to the database. However, the built-in mapping types aren’t designed to perform arbitrary conversions, such as mapping a VARCHAR field value to a .NET Int32 property value. If you want this kind of functionality, you will have to define your own custom value types. We will get to that topic a little later in this chapter. We’ll now discuss the basic types; date and time, objects, large objects, and various other built-in mapping types and show you what .NET and System.Data.DbType data types they handle. DbTypes are used to infer the data provider types (hence SQL data types). .NET primitive mapping types The basic mapping types in table A map .NET primitive types to appropriate DbTypes. Table A Primitive types Mapping Type .NET Type System.Data.DbType Int16 System.Int16 DbType.Int16 Int32 System.Int32 DbType.Int32 Int64 System.Int64 DbType.Int64 Single System.Single DbType.Single Double System.Double DbType.Double Decimal System.Decimal DbType.Decimal Byte System.Byte DbType.Byte Char System.Char DbType.StringFixedLength - 1 character AnsiChar System.Char DbType.AnsiStringFixedLength - 1 character Boolean System.Boolean DbType.Boolean Guid System.Guid DbType.Guid PersistentEnum System.Enum (an enumeration) The DbType for the underlying value TrueFalse System.Boolean DbType.AnsiStringFixedLength - either 'T' or 'F' YesNo System.Boolean DbType.AnsiStringFixedLength - either 'Y' or 'N' You’ve probably noticed that your database doesn’t support some of the DbTypes listed in table A. However, ADO.NET provides a partial abstraction of vendor-specific SQL data types, allowing NHibernate to work with ANSI-standard types when executing data manipulation language (DML). For database-specific DDL generation, NHibernate translates from the ANSI-standard type to an appropriate vendor-specific type, using the built-in support for specific SQL dialects. (You usually don’t have to worry about SQL data types if you’re using NHibernate for data access and data schema definition.) NHibernate supports a number of mapping types coming from Hibernate for compatibility (useful for those coming over from Hibernate or using Hibernate tools to generate hbm.xml files). Table B lists the additional names of NHibernate mapping types. Table B Additional names of NHibernate mapping types Mapping type Additional name Binary binary Boolean boolean Byte byte Character character CultureInfo locale DateTime datetime Decimal big_decimal Double double Guid guid Int16 short Int32 int Int32 integer Int64 long Single float String string TrueFalse true_false Type class YesNo yes_no From this table, you can see that writing type="integer" or type="int" is identical to type="Int32". Note that this table contains many mapping types that will be discussed in the following sections. Date/time mapping types Table C lists NHibernate types associated with dates, times, and timestamps. In your domain model, you may choose to represent date and time data using either System.DateTime or System.TimeSpan. As they have different purposes, the choice should be easy. Table C Date and time typesExcerptOpenSourceSOAch5-6.doc Mapping Type .NET Type System.Data.DbType DateTime System.DateTime DbType.DateTime - ignores the milliseconds Ticks System.DateTime DbType.Int64 TimeSpan System.TimeSpan DbType.Int64 Timestamp System.DateTime DbType.DateTime - as specific as database supports Object mapping types All .NET types in tables A and C are value types (i.e. derived from System.ValueType). This means that they can’t be null; unless you use the .NET 2.0 Nullable structure or the Nullables add-in, as discussed in the next section. Table D lists NHibernate types for handling .NET types derived from System.Object (which can store null values). Table D Nullable object typesExcerptOpenSourceSOAch5-6.doc Mapping Type .NET Type System.Data.DbType String System.String DbType.String AnsiString System.String DbType.AnsiString This table is completed by tables E and F which also contain nullable mapping types. Large object mapping types Table E lists NHibernate types for handling binary data and large objects. Note that none of these types may be used as the type of an identifier property. Table E Binary and large object typesExcerptOpenSourceSOAch5-6.doc Mapping Type .NET Type System.Data.DbType Binary System.Byte[] DbType.Binary BinaryBlob System.Byte[] DbType.Binary StringBlob System.String DbType.String Serializable Any System.Object marked with SerializableAttribute DbType.Binary BinaryBlob and StringClob are mainly supported by SQL Server. They can have a very large size and are fully loaded in memory. This can be a performance killer if used to store very large objects. So use this feature carefully. Note that you must set the NHibernate property "prepare_sql" to "true" to enable this feature. You can find up-to-date design patterns and tips for large object usage on the NHibernate website. Various CLR mapping types Table F lists NHibernate types for various other types of the CLR that may be represented as DbType.Strings in the database. Table F Other CLR-related typesExcerptOpenSourceSOAch5-6.doc Mapping Type .NET Type System.Data.DbType CultureInfo System.Globalization.CultureInfo DbType.String - 5 chars for culture Type System.Type DbType.String holding Assembly Qualified Name Certainly, isn’t the only NHibernate mapping element that has a type attribute. Using mapping types All of the basic mapping types may appear almost anywhere in the NHibernate mapping document, on normal property, identifier property, and other mapping elements. The , , , , , and elements all define an attribute named type. (There are certain limitations on which mapping basic types may function as an identifier or discriminator type, however.) You can see how useful the built-in mapping types are in this mapping for the BillingDetails class: ... The BillingDetails class is mapped as an entity. Its discriminator, id, and Number properties are value typed, and we use the built-in NHibernate mapping types to specify the conversion strategy. It’s often not necessary to explicitly specify a built-in mapping type in the XML mapping document. For instance, if you have a property of .NET type System.String, NHibernate will discover this using reflection and select String by default. We can easily simplify the previous mapping example: .... For each of the built-in mapping types, a constant is defined by the class NHibernate. NHibernateUtil. For example, NHibernate.String represents the String mapping type. These constants are useful for query parameter binding, as discussed in more detail in chapter 8: session.CreateQuery("from Item i where i.Description like :desc") .SetParameter("desc", desc, NHibernate.String) .List(); These constants are also useful for programmatic manipulation of the NHibernate mapping metamodel, as discussed in chapter 3. Of course, NHibernate isn’t limited to the built-in mapping types; you can create your own custom mapping types for handling certain scenarios. We’ll take a look this next, and explain how the mapping type system is a central to NHibernates flexibility. Creating custom mapping types Object-oriented languages like C# make it easy to define new types by writing new classes. Indeed, this is a fundamental part of the definition of object orientation. If you were limited to the predefined built-in NHibernate mapping types when declaring properties of persistent classes, you’d lose much of C#’s expressiveness. Furthermore, your domain model implementation would be tightly coupled to the physical data model, since new type conversions would be impossible. In order to avoid that, NHibernate provides a very powerful feature called custom mapping types. NHibernate provides two user-friendly interfaces that applications may use when defining new mapping types, the first being NHibernate.UserTypes.IUserType. IUserType is suitable for most simple cases and even for some more complex problems. Let’s use it in a simple scenario. Our Bid class defines an Amount property and our Item class defines an InitialPrice property, both monetary values. So far, we’ve only used a simple System.Double to represent the value, mapped with Double to a single DbType.Double column. Suppose we wanted to support multiple currencies in our auction application and that we had to refactor the existing domain model for this change. One way to implement this change would be to add new properties to Bid and Item: AmountCurrency and InitialPriceCurrency. We would then map these new properties to additional VARCHAR columns with the built-in String mapping type. Imagine if we had currency stored in 100 places, this would be lots of changes. We hope you never use this approach! Creating an implementation of IUserType Instead, we should create a MonetaryAmount class that encapsulates both currency and amount. This is a class of the domain model and doesn’t have any dependency on NHibernate interfaces: [Serializable] public class MonetaryAmount { private readonly double value; private readonly string currency; public MonetaryAmount(double value, string currency) { this.value = value; this.currency = currency; } public double Value { get { return value; } } public string Currency { get { return currency; } } public override bool Equals(object obj) { ... } public override int GetHashCode() { ... } } We’ve also made life simpler by making MonetaryAmount an immutable class, meaning it can’t be changed after it’s instantiated. We would have to implement Equals() and GetHashCode() to complete the class - but there is nothing special to consider here aside that they must be consistent, and GetHashCode() should return mostly unique numbers. We will use this new MonetaryAmount to replace the Double, as defined on the InitialPrice property for Item. We would benefit by using this new class in other places, such as the Bid.Amount. The next challenge is in mapping our new MonetaryAmount properties to the database. Suppose we’re working with a legacy database that contains all monetary amounts in USD. Our new class means our application code is no longer restricted to a single currency, but it will take time to get the changes done by the database team. Until this happens, we’d like to store just the Amount property of MonetaryAmount to the database. Because we can’t store the currency yet, we’ll convert all Amounts to USD before we save them, and from USD when we load them. The first step to handling this is to tell NHibernate how to handle our Monetarymount type. To do this, we create a MonetaryAmountUserType class that implements the NHibernate interface IUserType. Our custom mapping type is shown in listing A. Listing A Custom mapping type for monetary amounts in USD using System; using System.Data; using NHibernate.UserTypes; public class MonetaryAmountUserType : IUserType { private static readonly NHibernate.SqlTypes.SqlType[] SQL_TYPES = { NHibernateUtil.Double.SqlType }; public NHibernate.SqlTypes.SqlType[] SqlTypes { |1 get { return SQL_TYPES; } } public Type ReturnedType { get { return typeof(MonetaryAmount); } } |2 public new bool Equals( object x, object y ) { |3 if ( object.ReferenceEquals(x,y) ) return true; if (x == null || y == null) return false; return x.Equals(y); } public object DeepCopy(object value) { return value; } |4 public bool IsMutable { get { return false; } } |5 public object NullSafeGet(IDataReader dr, string[] names, object owner){ |6 object obj = NHibernateUtil.Double.NullSafeGet(dr, names[0]); if ( obj==null ) return null; double valueInUSD = (double) obj; return new MonetaryAmount(valueInUSD, "USD"); } public void NullSafeSet(IDbCommand cmd, object obj, int index) { |7 if (obj == null) { ((IDataParameter)cmd.Parameters[index]).Value = DBNull.Value; } else { MonetaryAmount anyCurrency = (MonetaryAmount)obj; MonetaryAmount amountInUSD = MonetaryAmount.Convert( anyCurrency, "USD" ); ((IDataParameter)cmd.Parameters[index]).Value = amountInUSD.Value; } } public static MonetaryAmount Convert( MonetaryAmount m, string targetCurrency) { ... |8 } } The SqlTypes property tells NHibernate what SQL column types to use for DDL schema generation, as seen in #1. The types are subclasses of NHibernate.SqlTypes.SqlType. Notice that this property returns an array of types. An implementation of IUserType may map a single property to multiple columns, but our legacy data model only has a single Double. In #2, we can see that ReturnedType tells NHibernate what .NET type is mapped by this IUserType. The IUserType is responsible for dirty-checking property values (#3). The Equals() method compares the current property value to a previous snapshot and determines whether the property is dirty and must by saved to the database. The IUserType is also partially responsible for creating the snapshot in the first place, as shown in #4. Since MonetaryAmount is an immutable class, the DeepCopy() method returns its argument. In the case of a mutable type, it would need to return a copy of the argument to be used as the snapshot value. This method is also called when an instance of the type is written to or read from the second level cache. NHibernate can make some minor performance optimizations for immutable types. The IsMutable (#5) property tells NHibernate that this type is immutable. The NullSafeGet() method shown near #6 retrieves the property value from the ADO.NET IDataReader. You can also access the owner of the component if you need it for the conversion. All database values are in USD, so you have to convert the MonetaryAmount returned by this method before you show it to the user. In #7, the NullSafeSet() method writes the property value to the ADO.NET IDbCommand. This method takes whatever currency is set and converts it to a simple Double USD value before saving. Note that, for briefness, we haven’t provided a Convert function as shown in #8. If we were to implement it, it would have code that converts between various currencies. Mapping the InitialPrice property of Item can be done as follows: This is the simplest kind of transformation that an implementation of IUserType could perform. It takes a Value Type class and maps it to a single database column. Much more sophisticated things are possible; a custom mapping type could perform validation, it could read and write data to and from an Active Directory, or it could even retrieve persistent objects from a different NHibernate ISession for a different database. You’re limited mainly by your imagination and performance concerns! In a perfect world, we’d prefer to represent both the amount and currency of our monetary amounts in the database, so we’re not limited to storing just USD. We could still use an IUserType for this, but it’s limited; If an IUserType is mapped with more than one property, we can’t use them our HQL or Criteria queries. The NHibernate query engine wouldn’t know anything about the individual properties of MonetaryAmount. You still access the properties in your C# code (MonetaryAmount is just a regular class of the domain model, after all), but not in NHibernate queries. To allow for a custom value type with multiple properties that can be accessed in queries, we should use the ICompositeUserType interface. This interface exposes the properties of our MonetaryAmount to NHibernate. Creating an implementation of ICompositeUserType To demonstrate the flexibility of custom mapping types, we won’t have to change our MonetaryAmount domain model class at all—we change only the custom mapping type, as shown in listing B. Listing B Custom mapping type for monetary amounts in new database schemas using System; using System.Data; using NHibernate.UserTypes; public class MonetaryAmountCompositeUserType : ICompositeUserType { public Type ReturnedClass { get { return typeof(MonetaryAmount); } } public new bool Equals( object x, object y ) { if ( object.ReferenceEquals(x,y) ) return true; if (x == null || y == null) return false; return x.Equals(y); } public object DeepCopy(object value) { return value; } public bool IsMutable { get { return false; } } public object NullSafeGet(IDataReader dr, string[] names, NHibernate.Engine.ISessionImplementor session, object owner) { object obj0 = NHibernateUtil.Double.NullSafeGet(dr, names[0]); object obj1 = NHibernateUtil.String.NullSafeGet(dr, names[1]); if ( obj0==null || obj1==null ) return null; double value = (double) obj0; string currency = (string) obj1; return new MonetaryAmount(value, currency); } public void NullSafeSet(IDbCommand cmd, object obj, int index, NHibernate.Engine.ISessionImplementor session) { if (obj == null) { ((IDataParameter)cmd.Parameters[index]).Value = DBNull.Value; ((IDataParameter)cmd.Parameters[index+1]).Value = DBNull.Value; } else { MonetaryAmount amount = (MonetaryAmount)obj; ((IDataParameter)cmd.Parameters[index]).Value = amount.Value; ((IDataParameter)cmd.Parameters[index+1]).Value = amount.Currency; } } public string[] PropertyNames { |1 get { return new string[] { "Value", "Currency" }; } } public NHibernate.Type.IType[] PropertyTypes { |2 get { return new NHibernate.Type.IType[] { NHibernateUtil.Double, NHibernateUtil.String }; } } public object GetPropertyValue(object component, int property) { |3 MonetaryAmount amount = (MonetaryAmount) component; if (property == 0) return amount.Value; else return amount.Currency; } public void SetPropertyValue(object comp, int property, object value) { |4 throw new Exception("Immutable!"); } public object Assemble(object cached, |5 NHibernate.Engine.ISessionImplementor session, object owner) { return cached; } public object Disassemble(object value, |6 NHibernate.Engine.ISessionImplementor session) { return value; } } #1 shows how an implementation of ICompositeUserType has its own properties, defined by PropertyNames. Similarly, the properties each have their own type, as defined by PropertyTypes (#2). The GetPropertyValue() method, shown in #3, returns the value of an individual property of the MonetaryAmount. Since MonetaryAmount is immutable, we can’t set property values individually (see #4) This isn’t a problem because this method is optional anyway. In #5, the Assemble() method is called when an instance of the type is read from the second-level cache. The Disassemble() method is called when an instance of the type is written to the second-level cache, as shown in #6. The order of properties must be the same in the PropertyNames, PropertyTypes, and GetPropertyValues() methods. The InitialPrice property now maps to two columns, so we declare both in the mapping file. The first column stores the value; the second stores the currency of the MonetaryAmount. Note that the order of columns must match the order of properties in your type implementation: In a query, we can now refer to the Amount and Currency properties of the custom type, even though they don’t appear anywhere in the mapping document as individual properties: from Item i where i.InitialPrice.Value > 100.0 and i.InitialPrice.Currency = 'XAF' In this example we’ve expanded the buffer between the .NET object model and the SQL database schema with our custom composite type. Both representations can now handle changes more robustly. If implementing custom types seems complex, relax; you rarely need to use a custom mapping type. An alternative way to represent the MonetaryAmount class is to use a component mapping, as in section 4.4.2, “Using components.” The decision to use a custom mapping type is often a matter of taste. There are few more interfaces that can be used to implement custom types; they are introduced in the next section. Other interfaces to create custom mapping types You may find that the interfaces IUserType and ICompositeUserType do not allow you to easily add more features to your custom types. In this case, you will need to use some of the other interfaces which are in the NHibernate.UserTypes namespace: The IParameterizedType interface allows you to supply parameters to your custom type in the mapping file. This interface has a unique method: SetParameterValues(IDictionary parameters) that will be called at the initialization of your type. Here is an example of mapping providing a parameter: Euro This mapping tells the custom type to use Euro as currency if it isn’t specified. The IEnhancedUserType interface makes it possible to implement a custom type that can be marshalled to and from its string representation. This functionality allows this type to be used as identifier or discriminator type. To create a type that can be used as version, you must implement the IUserVersionType interface. The INullableUserType interface allows you to interpret non-null values in a property as null in the database. When using dynamic-insert or dynamic-update, fields identified as null will not be inserted or updated. This information may also be used when generating the where clause of the SQL command when optimistic locking is enabled. The last interface is different from the previous because it is meant to implement user defined collection types: IUserCollectionType. For more details, take a look at the implementation NHibernate.Test.UserCollection.MyListType in the source code of NHibernate. Now, let’s look at an extremely important application of custom mapping types. Nullable types are found in almost all enterprise applications. Using Nullable types With .NET 1.1, primitive types can not be null; but this is no longer the case in .NET 2.0. Let’s say that we want to add a DismissDate to the class User. As long as a user is active, its DismissDate should be null. But the System.DateTime struct can not be null. And we don’t want to use some "magic" value to represent the null state. With .NET 2.0 (and 3.5 of course), you can simply write: public class User { ... private DateTime? dismissDate; public DateTime? DismissDate { get { return dismissDate; } set { dismissDate = value; } } ... } We omit other properties and methods because we focus on the nullable property. And no change is required in the mapping. If you work with .NET 1.1, the Nullables add-in (in the NHibernateContrib package for versions prior to NHibernate 1.2.0) contains a number of custom mapping types which allow primitive types to be null. For our previous case, we can use the Nullables.NullableDateTime class: using Nullables; [Class] public class User { ... private NullableDateTime dismissDate; [Property] public NullableDateTime DismissDate { get { return dismissDate; } set { dismissDate = value; } } ... } The mapping is quite straightforward: ... It is important to note that, in the mapping, the type of DismissDate must be Nullables.NHibernate.NullableDateTimeType (from the file Nullables.NHibernate.dll). This type is a wrapper used to translate Nullables types from/to database types. But if when using the NHibernate.Mapping.Attributes library, this operation is automatic, that’s why we just had to put the attribute [Property]. The NullableDateTime type behaves exactly like System.DateTime; there are even implicit operators to easily interact with it. The Nullables library contains nullable types for most .NET primitive types supported by NHibernate. You can find more details in NHibernate documentation. Using enumerated types An enumeration (enum) is a special form of value type, which inherits from System.Enum and supplies alternate names for the values of an underlying primitive type. For example, the Comment class defines a Rating. If you recall, in our CaveatEmptor application, users are able to give other comments about other users. Instead of using a simple int property for the rating, we create an enumeration: public enum Rating { Excellent, Ok, Low } We then use this type for the Rating property of our Comment class. In the database, ratings would be represented as the type of the underlying value. In this case (and by default), it is Int32. And that’s all we have to do. We may specify type="Rating" in our mapping, but it is optional; NHibernate can use reflection to find this. One problem you might run into is using enumerations in NHibernate queries. Consider the following query in HQL that retrieves all comments rated “Low”: IQuery q = session.CreateQuery("from Comment c where c.Rating = Rating.Low"); This query doesn’t work, because NHibernate doesn’t know what to do with Rating.Low and will try to use it as a literal. We have to use a bind parameter and set the rating value for the comparison dynamically (which is what we need for other reasons most of the time): IQuery q = session.CreateQuery("from Comment c where c.Rating = :rating"); q.SetParameter("rating", Rating.Low, NHibernateUtil.Enum(typeof(Rating)); The last line in this example uses the static helper method NHibernateUtil.Enum() to define the NHibernate Type, a simple way to tell NHibernate about our enumeration mapping and how to deal with the Rating.Low value. We’ve now discussed all kinds of NHibernate mapping types: built-in mapping types, user-defined custom types, and even components. They’re all considered value types, because they map objects of value type (not entities) to the database. With a good understanding of what value types are, and how they are mapped, you can now move on to the more complex issue of collections of value typed instances.
October 8, 2009
by Alvin Ashcraft
· 69,257 Views · 1 Like
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