Hibernate noob - retrieve partial object - nhibernate

Greetings!
I have the following class and at times need to retrieve only title and subTitle elements:
public class Article implements Serializable {
private static final long serialVersionUID;
private int id;
private String title;
private String subTitle;
private String body;
....
}
What's the best way to facilitate this? I thought about making title and subTitle stand alone objects but I honestly don't know what I'm doing yet.
I have the luxury of changing the entire composition of Article, but asking first is the most sensible thing for me at the moment.
Thanks in advance.

You can annotate every simple property with LAZY -> just like this #Basic(fetch = FetchType.LAZY)
So, it will be loaded only if you need

Provided this is for displaying purpose, you could also rely on a ResultTransformer.
See this SO answer which deals with similar problem and limits the retrieved properties.

I think you can solve this by creating a specific class to hold the information you want, then you import it in your mapping. See 5.1.19.import in the manual. I believe you can use the imported class in your HQL, like this:
"select new Titles(a.title, a.subTitle) from Article a where a.id = :id"
Here's a blog post I found on this subject: http://gustavoringel.blogspot.com/2009/02/creating-dto-in-nhibernate-hql-using.html.
Good luck!

Related

NullObject Pattern: How to handle fields?

Suppose we have Book class which contains year_published public field. If I want to implement NullObject design pattern, I will need to define NullBook class which behaves same as Book but does not do anything.
Question is, what should be the behavior of NullBook when it's fields are being assigned?
Book book = find_book(id_value); //this method returns a NullBook instance because it cannot find the book
book.year_published = 2016; //What should we do here?!
The first thing you should do is to make your properties private.
class NullBook {
private year_published;
// OR solution2 private year_published = null;
public setYearPublished(year_published) {
this.year_published = null;
// OR solution2 do nothing!
}
}
You can also define the field private in the parent class, so the children will have to implement the setter to acces the field
class Book {
private year_published;
public setYearPublished(year_published) {
this.year_published = year_published;
}
}
class NullBook extends Book {
public setYearPublished(year_published) {
parent::setYearPublished(null);
}
}
Why use getters and setters?
https://stackoverflow.com/a/1568230/2377164
Thing is: patterns are about balancing. Yes, it is in general good practice to not return null, but to having else to return; but well: what is returned should still make sense!
And to a certain degree, I don't see how having a "NullBook" really helps with the design of your application. Especially as you allow access to various internal fields. You exactly asked the correct question: what should be the published year, or author, or ... of such a "NullBook"?!
What happens for example when some piece of code does a "lookup" on books from different "sources"; and then tries to sort those books on the published year. You sure don't want your NullBook to ever be part of such data.
Thus I fail to see the value in having this class, to the contrary: I see it creating a potential for "interesting" bugs; thus my answer is: step back and re-consider if you really need that class.
There are alternatives to null-replacing objects: maybe your language allows for Optionals; or, you rework those methods that could return null ... to return a collection/array of books; and in doubt: that list/array is simply empty.
Long story short: allowing other classes direct access to private fields is a much more of an import design smell; so you shouldn't be too focused on NullObjects, while giving up on such essential things as Information Hiding so easily on the other hand.

SerializationException: type not included in serializable type set

In my Google Web Toolkit project, I got the following error:
com.google.gwt.user.client.rpc.SerializationException: Type ‘your.class.Type’ was not included in the set of types which can be serialized by this SerializationPolicy or its Class object could not be loaded. For security purposes, this type will not be serialized.
What are the possible causes of this error?
GWT keeps track of a set of types which can be serialized and sent to the client. your.class.Type apparently was not on this list. Lists like this are stored in .gwt.rpc files. These lists are generated, so editing these lists is probably useless. How these lists are generated is a bit unclear, but you can try the following things:
Make sure your.class.Type implements java.io.Serializable
Make sure your.class.Type has a public no-args constructor
Make sure the members of your.class.Type do the same
Check if your program does not contain collections of a non-serializable type, e.g. ArrayList<Object>. If such a collection contains your.class.Type and is serialized, this error will occur.
Make your.class.Type implement IsSerializable. This marker interface was specifically meant for classes that should be sent to the client. This didn't work for me, but my class also implemented Serializable, so maybe both interfaces don't work well together.
Another option is to create a dummy class with your.class.Type as a member, and add a method to your RPC interface that gets and returns the dummy. This forces the GWT compiler to add the dummy class and its members to the serialization whitelist.
I'll also add that if you want to use a nested class, use a static member class.
I.e.,
public class Pojo {
public static class Insider {
}
}
Nonstatic member classes get the SerializationException in GWT 2.4
I had the same issue in a RemoteService like this
public List<X> getX(...);
where X is an interface. The only implementation did conform to the rules, i.e. implements Serializable or IsSerializable, has a default constructor, and all its (non-transient and non-final) fields follow those rules as well.
But I kept getting that SerializationException until I changed the result type from List to X[], so
public X[] getX(...);
worked. Interestingly, the only argument being a List, Y being an interface, was no problem at all...
I have run into this problem, and if you per chance are using JPA or Hibernate, this can be a result of trying to return the query object and not creating a new object and copying your relavant fields into that new object. Check the following out, which I saw in a google group.
#SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
public static List<Article> getForUser(User user)
{
List<Article> articles = null;
PersistenceManager pm = PMF.get().getPersistenceManager();
try
{
Query query = pm.newQuery(Article.class);
query.setFilter("email == emailParam");
query.setOrdering("timeStamp desc");
query.declareParameters("String emailParam");
List<Article> results = (List<Article>) query.execute(user.getEmail
());
articles = new ArrayList<Article>();
for (Article a : results)
{
a.getEmail();
articles.add(a);
}
}
finally
{
pm.close();
}
return articles;
}
this helped me out a lot, hopefully it points others in the right direction.
Looks like this question is very similar to what IsSerializable or not in GWT?, see more links to related documentation there.
When your class has JDO annotations, then this fixed it for me (in addition to the points in bspoel's answer) : https://stackoverflow.com/a/4826778/1099376

An alternative way to use Azure Table Storage?

I'd like to use for table storage an entity like this:
public class MyEntity
{
public String Text { get; private set; }
public Int32 SomeValue { get; private set; }
public MyEntity(String text, Int32 someValue)
{
Text = text;
SomeValue = someValue;
}
}
But it's not possible, because the ATS needs
Parameterless constructor
All properties public and
read/write.
Inherit from TableServiceEntity;
The first two, are two things I don't want to do. Why should I want that anybody could change some data that should be readonly? or create objects of this kind in a inconsistent way (what are .ctor's for then?), or even worst, alter the PartitionKey or the RowKey. Why are we still constrained by these deserialization requirements?
I don't like develop software in that way, how can I use table storage library in a way that I can serialize and deserialize myself the objects? I think that as long the objects inherits from TableServiceEntity it shouldn't be a problem.
So far I got to save an object, but I don't know how retrieve it:
Message m = new Message("message XXXXXXXXXXXXX");
CloudTableClient tableClient = account.CreateCloudTableClient();
tableClient.CreateTableIfNotExist("Messages");
TableServiceContext tcontext = new TableServiceContext(account.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, account.Credentials);
var list = tableClient.ListTables().ToArray();
tcontext.AddObject("Messages", m);
tcontext.SaveChanges();
Is there any way to avoid those deserialization requirements or get the raw object?
Cheers.
If you want to use the Storage Client Library, then yes, there are restrictions on what you can and can't do with your objects that you want to store. Point 1 is correct. I'd expand point 2 to say "All properties that you want to store must be public and read/write" (for integer properties you can get away with having read only properties and it won't try to save them) but you don't actually have to inherit from TableServiceEntity.
TableServiceEntity is just a very light class that has the properties PartitionKey, RowKey, Timestamp and is decorated with the DataServiceKey attribute (take a look with Reflector). All of these things you can do to a class that you create yourself and doesn't inherit from TableServiceEntity (note that the casing of these properties is important).
If this still doesn't give you enough control over how you build your classes, you can always ignore the Storage Client Library and just use the REST API directly. This will give you the ability to searialize and deserialize the XML any which way you like. You will lose the all of the nice things that come with using the library, like ability to create queries in LINQ.
The constraints around that ADO.NET wrapper for the Table Storage are indeed somewhat painful. You can also adopt a Fat Entity approach as implemented in Lokad.Cloud. This will give you much more flexibility concerning the serialization of your entities.
Just don't use inheritance.
If you want to use your own POCO's, create your class as you want it and create a separate tableEntity wrapper/container class that holds the pK and rK and carries your class as a serialized byte array.
You can use composition to achieve what you want.
Create your Table Entities as you need to for storage and create your POCOs as wrappers on those providing the API you want the rest of your application code to see.
You can even mix in some interfaces for better code.
How about generating the POCO wrappers at runtime using System.Reflection.Emit http://blog.kloud.com.au/2012/09/30/a-better-dynamic-tableserviceentity/

C# Dynamic Type in a GenericCollection Property

I have a control mycontrol.ascx
This control has a property:
private GenericCollection<Item> myCollection;
public GenericCollection<Item> MyCollection
{
get { return myCollection; }
set { myCollection= value; }
}
Does anyone know how i could dynamically change from type Item to say type Product?
You can't. One of the main ideas with generics is that they are type safe. If you want to be able to alter which type that is stored MyCollection, you will need to use some type from which both Item and Product are derived.
As you have specified C# 2.0 then I think the answer will be that you can't. C# is statically typed and this code types the generic collection to a collection of Item. If Product were a superclass of Item then I believe you could store them in this collection but you'd need to query the object type when you retrieved it from the collection as it'll always come back as an Item.
I'll throw a question back at you, what are you trying to achieve in this dynamic replacement and why? There may be a better answer.
EDIT
Thinking about it further, following the comment, you might be able to do it using an interface, i.e.:
public IList myCollection { get; set; }
I haven't tried it, away from my dev station but might spark some others to either agree or correct me :)

Complex Searching with NHibernate

I am curious about what methods do you use for complex searching with NHibernate ?
I am using Ayende's
What is yours ?
Thanks for your advices and answers.
If we have a complex dynamic search, we will usually construct a SearchParameter object and then pass that into a method that will build our criteria for us.
For example, if we were searching for a person we might have a search object that looks like this:
public class PersonSearchParameters
{
public string FirstName {get; set;}
public string LastName {get; set;}
public ICriteria GetSearchCriteria()
{
DetachedCriteria query = DetachedCriteria.For(typeof (Person));
//Add query parameters
Return query;
}
}
Then for each type of search, we'll be able to create the single criteria from the class, or we could have multple search parameter classes and chain them together
We use HQL, but we're still trying to wrap our heads around the Criteria API for complex queries. We have to manage a lot of duplication when using HQL.
I use pretty much Ayende's too jsut a bit more complex, what do you want to do that you cant do with that?
Basically what we added is that we have an interface where we define all the fields where we want to search and we call this when we are about to make the search which means that we can easily change what we are searching for.
Also we are using Active Record in the project ( on top of Hibernate) and tis pretty cool, loads of tasks gets simplified , thou the lack of docs does hurt sometimes
Cheer