Using a Factory to create JPA entities - java

I am Thinking of creating A JPA 2.0 Mapping of an entity, however I do not want to have any setters or expose a constructor, I want to use a Factory to create my class whenever it is fetched from the db.
I have taken a look at the pro JPA 2.0 book and some articles online, but cannot find anything similar, has anyone done anything like this?
Thank you,

Use field access and add a private constructor. JPA can access private fields.

Factory pattern actually is a good candidate for JPA Entities. However it is practically impossible to make entity manager use your custom factory on fetching unless you make your own JPA implementation.
But there are still many applications of factory, especially for CRUD programms. The most important IMHO is context depending defaults for fields, concerning user created new entities of course.
For full stack java-ee applications I prefer to use Singleton EJB for this purpose, as it has easy access to JPA Entity manager.
You can make protected constructor for entity to prevent user instantiation.

Related

JPA+Hibernate force JPA not to use Proxies on Lazy loading

We are using JPA + Hibernate.
I have some Many-to-one mappings which are lazy loaded.
In Service, I Initiallize the Many-to-one objects by calling their getter method. but proxy gets assigned to parent VO and not actual VO Object.
My Question is, Is there any way in JPA to force to use no proxy Strategy.
My limitation here is i cant use Hibernate Objects or annotaions like #LazytoOne etc.
thanks in advance.
You cannot prevent Hibernate from using proxy objects there due to the fact that somehow it has to guarantee it's a lazy relation.
You have multiple choices:
Trigger the initialization Hibernate.initialize(parent.getChild()). Note that this is not the best way to do it and this also requires an active transaction.
Fetch the relation when fetching the entity itself. This can be done with the Fetch Joins. JPQL/HQL/Criteria API are capable of doing this.
Use read-only projections which contains only the data you need. For this particular case you can use Spring Data JPA as it comes with such a feature.
I suggest you to go with either option 2 or 3 as they are the most effective ways to do this.
Furher reading about lazy-loading here.

Using DAOs with composite Objects

I am trying to rewrite a bunch of DAOs here is the setting:
only plain JDBC (no JPA, ORM whatsoever)
no interfaces used
lots of checks before inserting an object
Business objects are strongly linked
My main question is:
How do I persist/retrieve a business object that is composed of multiple other objects?
e.g. does my CustomerDAO know the AddressDAO and retrieve the csutomers adresses from there?
only plain JDBC (no JPA, ORM whatsoever)
Business objects are strongly linked
Not sure why you don't want to use JPA while you want your business objects to be linked, but at least you should use Spring JDBC template that would relieve you from some boilerplate code.
Regarding the other constraints, I would do it as follows:
I would still employ interfaces to define the DAO methods and implement them in a Spring JDBC template backed DAOImpl. Use the DAO everywhere and inject the DAOImpl.
My DAOs will be simply one-to-one mapping to the underlying tables and each DAO wouldn't know about the existence of other DAOs.
My Manager layer will have all the business logic that runs validation checks and prepares the set of objects that need to be persisted, calls the appropriate DAO and appropriate method (CREATE/UPDATE/DELETE) to persist the objects.
Again, the Manager layer will follow the interface-based implementation and the view layer would have manager types injected with the ManagerImpls.
My two cents!
You may Consider Using JOOQ. It is not JPA, but it may easily be used as an alternative solution. It is lightweight enough. It also provides provides a reverse engineer tool, where it builds your Database entities as DAO objects.
I have embed JOOQ in a relevant situation, where the application was fairly engineered designed. I didn't use its DAO functionality, rather than using it as a higher layer to avoid messing with JDBC Layer.
Cheers!
Composite entities are a layer above DAO's. If you want to remove ALL coupling, domain objects persisted by DAOs should be flat without relationships. See Core J2EE patterns CompositeEntity.
Also, it's a good idea not to introduce coupling inbetween the DAO's by putting finders for one in the other. E.g.:
AddressDAO.findForCustomerId(id);
is inferior to using a third DAO to manage the relationship. I.E:
CustomerAddressRelDAO.findAddressForCustomer(id);
If you use a relationship DAO neither address nor customer are dependent on (or aware of) each other.

Can I get a reference from a JPA bean to the EntityManager instance that manages it?

The question basically sums it up.
Play framework has the JPABase class that JPA beans inherit from. This class has a method called em() which returns the bean's entityManager instance. Is there something equivalent to this in plain JPA?
AFAIK, no. And I would find it very questionable. JPA entities are supposed to be POJOs usable outside of the persistence layer, where the JPA classes are not even in the classpath. Exposing the EntityManager in those POJOs seems wrong to me.
It looks like the Play Framework implements the Active Record pattern allowing you to make persistence operations directly in the bean. This is perfectly acceptable and you can implement a similar solution.
However, once you choose this approach, you will not have the benefits of POJOs. For example, this solution may not be the best alternative if your application has n-tier architecture.
Anyway take a look at the source code, it's free!
https://github.com/playframework/play/blob/master/framework/src/play/db/jpa/JPABase.java

Using stateless EJB beans in an Entity Bean

Obviously using stateless EJB beans in an entity bean smells, but please consider a scenario as follows and tell me if you know of a better solution:
I have an InvoiceTemplate Entity Bean with field NextInvoiceDate
Generating NextInvoiceDate is a complex procedure and should be performed outside of the InvoiceTemplate class
NextInvoiceDate should be updated each time InvoiceTemplate is stored to the db
For now I have logic regarding the generation of NextInvoiceDate in #PrePersist #PreUpdate methon in InvoiceTemplate entity bean. The logic is getting more and more complicated and I want to move it outside of the InvoiceTemplate entity bean. It looks to me that there should be a service to calculate NextInvoiceDate. But then is it right to invoke this service from the inside of InvoiceTemplate?
It isn't such a smell - it is a lean towards domain-driven design.
I don't know of any way to do this automatically, but you can:
in the session beans where you handle your Invoicetemplate, inject the helper bean that has the logic to calculate the next date
create a private field with a setter on the entity, and before you start using it call entity.setNextDateHelper(..)
You can also check whether AspectJ doesn't offer some EJB options so that you can inject the EJB whenever an entity of a given type (InvoiceTemplate) is created. AspectJ works like that with spring beans, I don't know whether there are such options for EJB.
Do you need anything as complicated as a service or EJB? Can you just write a static method (possibly on a utility class) to hold the logic? Normally I'm pretty biased against this sort of thing, but if all you've got is some complex logic that doesn't require any DB interaction or a lot of object collaboration, it may be the cleanest approach.

About Data Objects and DAO Design when using Hibernate

I'm hesitating between two designs of a database project using Hibernate.
Design #1.
(1) Create a general data provider interface, including a set of DAO interfaces and general data container classes. It hides the underneath implementation. A data provider implementation could access data in database, or an XML file, or a service, or something else. The user of a data provider does not to know about it.
(2) Create a database library with Hibernate. This library implements the data provider interface in (1).
The bad thing about Design #1 is that in order to hide the implementation details, I need to create two sets of data container classes. One in the general data provider interface - let's call them DPI-Objects, the other set is used in the database library, exclusively for entity/attribute mapping in Hibernate - let's call them H-Objects. In the DAO implementation, I need to read data from database to create H-Objects (via Hibernate) and then convert H-Objects into DPI-Objects.
Design #2.
Do not create a general data provider interface. Expose H-Objects directly to components that use the database lib. So the user of the database library needs to be aware of Hibernate.
I like design #1 more, but I don't want to create two sets of data container classes. Is that the right way to hide H-Objects and other Hibernate implementation details from the user who uses the database-based data provider?
Are there any drawbacks of Design #2? I will not implement other data provider in the new future, so should I just forget about the data provider interface and use Design #2?
What do you think about this? Thanks for your time!
Hibernate Domain objects are simple POJO so you won't have to create separate DPI-objects, H-Object themselves can be used directly. In DAO you can control whether they come from hibernate or anything else.
I highly recommend reading Chapter 4 "Hitting the database" of Spring in Action, 3rd edition, even if you aren't using Spring in your application. Although my second recommendation would be to use Spring :-)
The DAO pattern is a great way to keep database and ORM logic isolated in the DAO implementation, and you only need one set of entity objects. You can make that happen without Spring, it just takes more work managing your sessions and transactions.
If I understand your post, this is sort of a middle-ground between Design 1 and Design 2. The H-Objects (the entities that Hibernates loads and persists) don't need any Hibernate specific code in them at all. That makes them perfectly acceptable to be used as your DPI-Objects.
I've had arguments with folks in the past who complain that the use of JPA or Hibernate Annotations exposes Hibernate specifics through the DAO interface. I personally take a more pragmatic view, since annotations are just metadata, and don't directly affect the operation of your entity classes.
If you do feel that the annotations expose too much, then you can go old school and use Hibernate Mappings instead. Then your H-Objects are 100% Hibernate free :-)
I recommend design #2. Simply construct domain objects, and let hibernate look after them. Don't write separate classes that are persisted.
Hibernate tries to hide most of the persistence business from you. You may need to add a few small annotations to your entities to help it along. But certainly don't make separate classes.
You may need some very small DAO classes. For example, if you have a Person entity, it would be fairly common practice to have a PersonDAO object that saves a person. Having said that, the code inside the DAO will be very simple, so for a really small project, it may not be worth it. For a large project, it's probably worth keeping your persistence code separate from your business logic, in case you want to use a different persistence technology later.

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