JSP beans - Read the DB each time I load the page? - java

I have no code done yet but I'm thinking on how I'm supposed to do this in JSP/JSF.
So, I have some classes I was thinking I could load from a DB whenever the session starts. My first idea is that I just load them once with the necessary data from the DB, do all the operations, and then destroy the bean when the session is done. The problem is, what if another user changes information during the session? So I thought I could use a page scope, however I don't want to overload the server.
What's the best practice on this?

Firstly, each visitor to your app gets their own session-scoped bean, so you've only got to worry about persisting each user's changes to the data on the bean.
Secondly, you are worrying about matters which are taken into consideration by ORM offerings. Using the API provided by something like Spring JPA or Hibernate will present you with controls for persisting data changes back to the DB via a local handle on a Bean.

I decided to use an application scoped bean instead of a singleton class. That will do.

Related

JPA Best practice for managing entities in extended Persistence Context

I am using CDI conversation scoped, Seam managed extended persistence context (PC). This provides more fine-grained control over PC and avoids LIEs. I am using CDI Beans instead of EJB Beans. In a page, I retrieve list of entities and show them in a table. The selected entity record from the table is binded to the form and can be edited but not persisted until the "save" button is clicked. In this place the problem occurs, since all entities are managed the edited entities are also persisted when I try to flush/commit only one current entity in save action. What is the preferred best-practice approach to this kind of problems. Should I use middle POJO between the managed entity and the viewed/edited one? Should I detach then merge (before saving) the current in-progress entity? Any suggestions?
JPA 2.0, Hibernate 4.x
Seam 3 (Weld CDI, persistence, transaction, faces modules)
JSF 2.1
Java EE 6.
We used a similar approach but with EJB3 beans and without the Seam persistence context. Nevertheless, maybe our experience could be useful to you.
The idea was :
use an extended PersistenceContext in the bean
make all methods without transaction - otherwise your entities will be committed after the call
make the save method the one with a transaction.
Detaching the entities will kill the benefit of giving entities to the front, as you will throw LazyException each time you're trying to access something that wasn't loaded. It would be quite the same as use some DTO.
Hope it helps!
If i understand correctly, then:
Entity objects are displayed on a page
The user can make changes to those objects
The user can save an object to commit the changes to the database
I think the right approach here would be to detach the objects when they are edited, and then reattach them (by merging) when they are saved. That keeps the unsaved changes in memory only.
You don't actually need an extended persistence context for this, because any objects you need to keep between requests will be detached.
I am using Primefaces in front end and it was ajax submitting by default the changes made to the entity. The problem gone away after I have managed the Primefaces components.

Securing a Multi tenant SaaS application

I'm multing a multi-tenant SaaS web-application in Java, Spring, Struts2 and Hibernate. After a bit of research, i choose to implement multi-tenancy in a shared db, shared schema, shared table approach. And tagging each db-line with a tenantId.
I have rewritting my application, so Managers and Dao's will take the tenantId as a parameter to only serve the correct db-resources.
This works perfect for all view's when getting information. And also for creating new stuff (using the logged in users tenantId to store the info).
However, for updating and deleting stuff I am not sure how to secure my application.
For example: When a user want to edit an object, the url will be: /edit?objectId=x
And this is mapped to an action that will retrieve this object by Id. Meaning any logged in user can by url-modification view any object.
This i can solve by adding the tenantId to the Dao so if the User tries to view an object outside his tenancy he will get nothing.
Ok thats ok then, but about when sending in the edit-form?
What if the user modifies the request, messing with the hidden field objectId so the action will receive a request to alter an object not belonging to the users tenancy.
Or if the users url-modifies a delete action /delete?objectId=x
Basicly I need some way of assure that the logged in user has access to whatever he is trying to do. For all get's its easy. Just putting the tenantId in the where clause.
But for updates and deletes i'm not sure what direction to go.
I could query the db for every update and delete to see if the users has access to the object, but i'm trying to keep db-interaction to the minimum. So i find it impractical to make an extra db-call for every such action.
Does anyone have any hints or tips to my issues?
The same for reading applies to writing/updating: user can only see/access/change what they own. Your question is more about database that about anything else. The same constraints you apply to viewing data must also apply to writing data.
In this case, you don't want to wear the performance of a query first then an update. That's fine, since you can update the database with conditions. Since this seems likely to be database-level in your case you need to know what your database is capable of (to do it in one go). For example, oracle has the merge statement.
I am quite late to this thread and maybe you have already built the solution you were asking here about. Anyway, I have implemented a database-per-tenant multitenant web application using Spring Boot 2 and secured the web access using Spring Security 5. The data access is via Spring JPA (with Hibernate 5 as the JPA provider). Do take a look here.

Create Hibernate-Session per Request

I just started a simple Java testproject which manages some entities using Hibernate and provides a REST interface to manipulate these objects and provide some additional business logic. The REST interface is created using RESTEasy and Jetty.
Everything works fine so far, but I have the feeling that I'm actually writing too much boilerplate code. As I don't have much experience in these Java frameworks I'm just wondering if anyone could give me a hint on how to improve the situation.
Creting Hibernate Sessions per Request
Well, as far as I understood I have to create a Hibernate session per request and at the end I have to close it. So currently all of my service methods look like this:
Session session = HibernateUtil.getInstance().getSessionFactory().openSession();
...
...
...
session.close();
Is there any way to remove these two lines in order to somehow do this automatically?
Currently my service is registered as a RestEASY singleton. Will changing to a RESTeasy ressource and creating the session in the constructor solve the problem? I think it will solve the problem of creating the session. But wherer to close it?
In C++ this can easily done be creating a scoped object which closes the session at the end. But in Java?
Whenever such a REST request is made I have to check for a valid session (the user has to login previously). Is a ServletFilter the right way to do this?
General: Are there any other patterns or frameworks I should consider using? I mean I want to keep it as simple as possible and especially as I dont have that much experience I dont want to end up using Spring or whatever heavyweight framework. Seems that I'm used to the simplicity of Python and Django but for this little project I have to use Java.
THanks so far!
Hibernate's current recommended approach for managing Sessions is detailed on this wiki page. In particular, I think you need to read the last paragraph: This is all very difficult, can't this be done easier?
In the end, you do need to tell the persistence layer that "I'm about to do something" (which usually also gets the Session to do it with) and "I'm done doing it". You can do it with annotations, or JTA transactions, but that information still has to be communicated!
Inject SessionFactory to your Data Access Object and use sessionFactory.getCurrentSession() to access Hibernate Session object.
you can make use of any of the Factory classes available to implement this..
Then your code should look like this..
sessionFactory.getCurrentSession().save(newInstance);
You should try writing a Filter that does this. Spring's OpenSessionInViewFilter is a good place to start if you need an example.

Am I using EJBs properly?

I am using a JEE6 stack including JPA 2.0, JSF 2.0, EJB 3.1 etc.
The way my architecture is setup is the following:
I have JPA annotated DAOs using hibernate as my JPA provider.
I have JSF Managed beans which correspond to my facelet/xhtml pages.
I have EJBs that handle all of my database requests.
My XHTML pages have JSF EL which make calls to my Managed beans. My managed beans contain references to my DAO entities which are managed by EJBs. For example, I have a user entity which is mapped to a db table. I have a user EJB which handles all CRUD operations that return Users. I have a page that edits a user. The highlevel workflow would be: navigate to user edit page -> EL calls a method located in the managed bean that loads a user. The method calls userEJB.loadUser(user) from the EJB to get the user from the database. The user is edited and submit -> a function is called in the managed bean which calls a function in the EJB to save the user. etc.
I am running into issues accessing my data within my JSF pages using EJBs.
I am having a lot of problems with lazy initialization errors, which I believe is due to how I have set things up.
For example, I have a Client entity that has a List of users which are lazily loaded. In order to get
a client I call a method in my EJB which goes to the database, finds a client and returns it. Later on
i wish to access this clients list of users, in order to do so i have to go back to the EJB by calling some sort of method in order to load those users (since they are lazily loaded). This means that I have to create a method such as
public List<User> getUserListByClient(Client c)
{
c = em.merge(c); return c.getUserList();
}
The only purpose of this method is to load the users (and I'm not even positive this approach is good or works).
If i was doing session management myself, I would like just leave the session open for the entire request and access the property directly, this would be fine as the session would be open anyway, there seems to be this one extra layer of indirection in EJBs which is making things difficult for me.
I do like EJBs as I like the fact that they are controlled by the container, pooled, offer transaction management for free etc. However, I get the feeling that I am using them incorrectly, or I have set up my JSF app incorrectly.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
thanks,
If i was doing session management
myself, I would like just leave the
session open for the entire request
and access the property directly, this
would be fine as the session would be
open anyway
Indeed, that's the open session in view pattern (also called open EntityManager in view). It can be used with EJB as well. Ideally, the transactions should be managed in the business layer/EJB so this can be seen a slight deviation from the pure layer architecture. But it solves the problem of lazy loading in the view and is easy.
Otherwise, you must make sure to eagerly load the information that will be used after the transaction is over. Or you may rely on DTO, but then it starts to be cumbersome.
Here are two more links that cover the topic and discuss pros/cons and alternatives:
SO question: Open Session In View Pattern
Xebia blog: JPA implementation patterns and especially this one
Your usage seems good. Just remember that em.merge(c) may save the changes made to Client c into the database. If you just want to get the UserList of Client c without saving the changes made to the Client c, then you can do this:
public List<User> getUserListByClient(Client c)
{
Client client = em.find(Client.class, c.clientId);
return client.getUserList();
}
Or better ,just send the Client Id to the getUserListByClient instead of passing a full Client object , just to save a tinsy winsy bit of memory :)

A typical lifecycle of a Hibernate object in a web app -?

Describe please a typical lifecycle of a Hibernate object (that maps to a db table) in a web app.
Suppose, you create a new instance of an object and persist in the db.
But during the app lifetime you'll be working on a detached object and finally
you need to update it in the database, for example on exit.
How does it look like with hibernate and spring?
p.s. Can transactions and sessions live between servlet transitions? So that we opened 1 session and use it in all servlets without a need to reopen it?
I'll try to give a descriptive example.
Suppose, when the app starts, the log record is created. this can be done at once,
Log log = new Log(...) and then something like save(log) -- log corresponds to a table LOG.
then, as the application processes user inputs and keeps going, new data is being accumulated.
and after the second step we could add something to a log object, a collection for example:
// now we have a tracking of what user chosen: Set thisUserChoice,
// so we can update the persistent object, we have new data now !
// log.userChoices = thisUserChoice.
Here occurs the nature of my question. How are we supposed to deal with it, if we want to
update the database whenever new data is gotten from a user?
In a relational model we can work with a row id, so we could get this record and update some other data of the row.
In Hibernate we are also able to load a object by its id.
But is IT THE WAY TO GO? IS ANYTHING BETTER?
You could do everything in a single session. But that's like doing everything in a single class. It could make sense from a beginner's point of view, but nobody does it like that in practice.
In a web app, you can normally expect to have several threads running at once, each dealing with a different user. Each thread would typically have a separate session, and the session would only have managed instances of the objects that were actually needed by that user. It's not that you can completely ignore concurrency in your own code, but it's useful to have hibernate's help. If you were to do everything with one session, you would have to do all the concurrency management yourself.
Hibernate can also manage the concurrency if you have multiple application servers talking to a single database. The separate JVMs can't possibly share the same session in this case...
The lifecycle is described in the hibernate documentation (which I'm sure you've seen).
Whenever a request comes from the web client to the server, the first thing you should do is load the relevant objects (see section 10.3) so that you have persistent, not detached entities to deal with. Then, you do whatever operations are required. When the session closes (ie. when the server returns the response to the client), it will write any updates to the database. Or, if your operation involves creating new entities, you'll have to create transient ones (with new) and then call persist() or save() (see section 10.2). That will result in a managed entity -- you can make more changes to it, and hibernate will record those changes when the session closes.
I try to avoid using detached objects. But if I have to (perhaps they're stored in the user's session), then whenever they might need to be saved to the database, you'll have to use update() (see section 10.6). This converts it into a managed object, and so the session will save any changes to the database when it's closed.
Spring makes it very easy to generate a new session for each request. You would normally tell Spring to create a sessionFactory, and then every request will be given its own session. Search for "spring hibernate tutorial" and you'll find several examples.
http://scbcd.blogspot.com/2007/01/hibernate-persistence-lifecycle.html This explains transient, persistent objects.
Also have a look at the Lifecycle interface to know what hibernate does (and it provides hooks at all stages for user to do something)

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