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Java Generics in use case VS standard type with Enum

In a Java Spring Boot DDD project we have several APIs exposed.
Now for only one of these APIs we need that the "Token" entity contains one more attribute: "Locales".
In use cases that use "Token" without "Locales" I would not want the getter of that new attribute to be accessible.
For this I am considering two options:
Add "Locales" to the "Token" entity and also another "Type" attribute (an Enum)
that, depending on whether it is of one type or another, when
accessing the "Locales" getter, returns the elements or an
Optional.Empty (or an exception). This way only the use cases that are
for the "LocalizedToken" will get the "Locales", but in my
opinion the interface is less clear and more errors could happen when
using attributes that are not really used in all APIs.
Extend "Token" with a "LocalizedToken" entity and make use cases that use each
exposed API only have access to the type it needs. For example, with
generics, create use case: CreateTokens<T extends Token>. This
option looks cleaner but requires a lot more modifications, as these
generics are spread throughout the domain, repositories, etc.
In your opinion, which is the best approach? Or any other suggestion?
Thanks!

domain driven design depends on static methods?

I have been reading a lot online/offline about where to put validation and business rules in general for domain driven design. What I could not understand is how can an entity provides methods that does validation and business rules without resorting to static methods or having a service? This is especially important for cases where the domain object does not need to be instantiate yet, but we need to validate a value that will eventually used to set the object's attribute.
I noticed blog postings such as http://lostechies.com/jimmybogard/2007/10/24/entity-validation-with-visitors-and-extension-methods/ relies on .NET's specific extension method, which is not available in programming languages such as Java. I personally don't like static methods are they cannot be overridden and hard to test.
Is there anyway I could do this without static methods or having to instantiate an unnecessary domain object just to use its validation and business rules methods. If not, does that mean domain driven design is very dependent on static methods?
Thanks

Use ValueObjects Not Entity.
In the registration case, a UserName value object could be introduced. Create a Username object when receiving the registration. Implement validation in the constructor of the UserName.
See this question and this presentation for more detail.
Edit1:
1.How to handle cases where different validation rules applied for different context. For example: The username must not have numbers for certain type of members, but it is required for other types of members?
Maybe different factory methods could do that. like UserName.forGoldenCardMember(...) or UserName.forPlainMember(...). Or make MemberType （a hierachy maybe） to validate UserName.
Another alternative solution is use AggregateFactory（AccountFactory in this case）.
2.Is constructor the only place to put the validation code? I did read online about two points of view: an object must always be valid vs. not always. Both present good arguments, but any other approach?
I prefer valid approach personally. Passing an maybe invalid value object harms encapsulabilty.
Edit2:
Require
a) validation business rule based on context(different username rules for member types)
b) keep validating all business rules even if one of them fail
Stick with Single responsibility principle by using Value Object(MemberType this case).
AggregateFactory could be introduced to ease the application layer(coarser granularity).
class AccoutFactory {
Account registerWith(Username username, MemberType type, ....) {
List<String> errors = new ArrayList<String>();
errors.addAll(type.listErrorsWith(username));
errors.add(//other error report...
if (CollectionUtils.isEmpty(errors)) {
return new Account(username,....);
} else {
throw new CannotRegisterAccountException(errors);
}
}
}
Edit3:
For questions in the comments
a) Shouldn't the Username object be the one that has a method that returns the error like
the listErrorsWith()? After all, it is the username that has different rules for different member type?
We could check this question from another perspective: MemberTypes have different rules for username. This may replace if/else block in the Username.listErrosWith(String, MemeberType) with polymorphism;
b) If we have the method in the MemberType, the knowledge will not be encapsulated in the Username.Also, we are talking about making sure Username is always valid.
We could define the validity of Username without MemberType rules. Let’s say "hippoom#stackoverflow.com" is a valid username, it is a good candidate for GoldenCard member but not good for SilverCard member.
c) I still can't see how performing validation that returns a list of errors without getting the list from exception thrown by the constructor or static method. Both does not look ideal IMHO.
Yes, the signature of listErrorsWith():List looks weired, I'd rather use validate(username) with no returning value(throw exception when fails). But this will force the cilent to catch every validation step to run validations all at once.

If you decided to use DDD in your application you need to build more complex solution. I agree with #Hippoom, you shouldn't use Entity for this purpose.
I would suggest this solution:
DTO -> Service Layer (ValidationService -> Converter) -> Persistence Layer (Repository)
Some explanation:
When you received DTO from client side with all necessary parameters, you should validate it in you service layer (e.g. Use another service like ValidationService) which can throw exception if something wrong. If all Ok, you can create Entity from your DTO in Converter and persist it in Repository.
If you want flexible solution for ValidationService I'd suggest Drools

Structural design pattern

I'm working with three separate classes: Group, Segment and Field. Each group is a collection of one or more segments, and each segment is a collection of one or more fields. There are different types of fields that subclass the Field base class. There are also different types of segments that are all subclasses of the Segment base class. The subclasses define the types of fields expected in the segment. In any segment, some of the fields defined must have values inputted, while some can be left out. I'm not sure where to store this metadata (whether a given field in a segment is optional or mandatory.)
What is the most clean way to store this metadata?

I'm not sure you are giving enough information about the complete application to get the best answer. However here are some possible approaches:
Define an isValid() method in your base class, which by default returns true. In your subclasses, you can code specific logic for each Segment or FieldType to return false if any requirements are missing. If you want to report an error message to say which fields are missing, you could add a List argument to the isValid method to allow each type to report the list of missing values.
Use Annotations (as AlexR said above).
The benefit of the above 2 approaches is that meta data is within the code, tied directly to the objects that require it. The disadvantage is that if you want to change the required fields, you will need to update the code and deploy a new build.
If you need something which can be changed on the fly, then Gangus suggestion of Xml is a good start, because your application could reload the Xml definition at run-time and produce different validation results.

I think, the best placement for such data will be normal XML file. And for work with such data the best structure will be also XMLDOM with XPATH. Work with classes will be too complicated.

Since java 5 is released this kind of metadata can be stored using annotations. Define your own annotation #MandatoryField and mark all mandatory fields with it. Then you can discover object field-by-field using reflection and check whether not initiated fields are mandatory and throw exception in this case.

Best practice: Java/XML serialization: how to determine to what class to deserialize?

I have an application that saves its context to XML. In this application, there is a hierarchy of classes, that all implement a common interface, and that represent different settings. For instance, a first setting class may be made of 4 public float fields, another one can be made of a sole HashMap.
I am trying to determine what is the best way to handle writing and reading to XML in a generic way. I read on this site a lot about JAXB and XStream for instance, which are able to make a specific class instance from XML.
However my question is related to the fact that the actual class can be anything that implement a given interface. When you read the XML file, how would you guess the actual class to instantiate from the XML data? How do you do that in your applications?
I thought that I could write the .class name in a XML attribute, read it and compare it to all possible class .class names, until I find a match. Is there a more sensible way?
Thanks

xstream should already take care of this and create the object of correct type.
The tutorial seems to confirm that:
To reconstruct an object, purely from the XML:
Person newJoe = (Person)xstream.fromXML(xml);
If you don't know the type, you will have to first assign it to the common interface type:
CommonInterface newObject = (CommonInterface)xstream.fromXML(xml);
// now you can either check its type or call virtual methods

In my case I just have a kind of header that stores the class name that is serialized and when de-serializing it I just use the header value to figure out to which class shall I de-serialize the values.

A best practice would to use an established, well documented XML parser/mapper. All of the serialization/deserialization work has been done, so you can worry about your business logic instead. Castor and Apache Axiom are two APIs that I have used to marshal/unmarshall(serialize/deserialize) Java Classes and XML.
http://www.castor.org
Apache Axiom

Java Programming - Spring and JDBCTemplate - Use query, queryForList or queryForRowSet?

My Java (JDK6) project uses Spring and JDBCTemplate for all its database access. We recently upgraded from Spring 2.5 to Spring 3 (RC1). The project does not use an ORM like Hibernate nor EJB.
If I need to read a bunch of records, and do some internal processing with them, it seems like there are several (overloaded) methods: query, queryForList and queryForRowSet
What should be the criteria to use one instead of the other? Are there any performance differences? Best practices?
Can you recommend some external references for further research on this topic?

I find that the standard way to access as list is via the query() methods rather than any of the other approaches. The main difference between query and the other methods is that you'll have to implement one of the callback interfaces (either RowMapper, RowCallbackHandler, or ResultSetExtractor) to handle your result set.
A RowMapper is likely what you'll find yourself using most of the time. It's used when each row of the result set corresponds to one object in your list. You only have to implement a single method mapRow where you populate the type of object that goes in your row and return it. Spring also has a BeanPropertyRowMapper which can populate the objects in a list via matching the bean property names to the column names (NB this class is for convenience not performance).
A RowCallbackHandler is more useful when you need your results to be more than just a simple list. You'll have to manage the return object yourself you are using this approach. I usually find myself using this when I need a map structure as my return type (i.e. for grouped data for a tree table or if I'm creating a custom cache based of the primary key).
A ResultSetExtractor is used when you want to control the iteration of the results. You implment a single method extractData that will be the return value of the call to query. I only find myself using this if I have to build some custom data structure that is more complex to build using either of the other callback interfaces.
The queryForList() methods are valuable in that you don't have to implement these callback methods. There are two ways use queryForList. The first is if you're only querying a single column from the database (for example a list of strings) you can use the versions of the method that takes a Class as an argument to automatically give you a list of only objects of those classes.
When calling the other implementations of queryForList() you'll get a list back with each entry being a map of for each column. While this is nice in that you are saved the expense of writing the callback methods, dealing with this data structure is quite unwieldy. You'll find yourself doing a lot of casting since the map's values are of type Object.
I've actually never seen the queryForRowSet methods used in the wild. This will load the entire result of the query into a CachedRowSet object wapped by a Spring SqlRowSet. I see a big downside in using this object in that if you're passing the SqlRowSet around to the other layers of your application, you're coupling those layers to your data access implementation.
You shouldn't see any huge performance differences between any of these calls except as I mentioned with the BeanPropertyRowMapper. If you're working with some complex manipulation of a large result set, you might be able to get some performance gains from writing an optimized ResultSetExtractor for your specific case.
If you want to learn more I would consult the Spring JDBC documentation and the JavaDoc for the classes I've mentioned. You can also take a look at some of the books on the Spring Framework. Though it's a bit dated Java Development with the Spring Framework has a very good section on working with the JDBC framework. Most of all, I would say just try writing some code with each method and see what works best for you.

Since you are in the wonderful Generics land, what you may really want to do is to use SimpleJdbcTemplate and use its query() methods for Lists of objects and queryForObject() for individual objects. Reasoning for this simply is that they're even easier to use than the ones in JdbcTemplate.

One small addition to the excellent answers above: additional methods, like queryForInt, queryForLong, queryForMap, queryForObject, etc. might seem like good options at times if you're running a simple query and expect a single row.
However, if you could get 0 or 1 rows back, the queryForList method is generally easier, otherwise you'd have to catch IncorrectResultSizeDataAccessException. I learned that the hard way.