The Java RIA Framework

Hi Henrik,

You don't have to change anything in Jspresso itself to use your custom extended entity descriptor. However, you won't be able to directly leverage their use in SJS since the DSL is not (yet) extensible. However, you can bypass SJS, at least to test your extensions and then submit them so that they can find a way to the codebase and get included in the DSL. To achieve that, you will directly use Spring to configure your entity descriptor (as it was achieved before 3.5).

So here are the steps :

1/ Create your custom entity descriptor

In the core module of your test project, create a subclass of org.jspresso.framework.model.descriptor.entity.basic.BasicEntityDescriptor (lets call it your.custom.package.ExtendedEntityDescriptor) and add your new properties along with their accessors (legacyTable and legacyPrimaryKeys).

2/ Use the custom entity descriptor in your Spring model context

Describe entities using your new extended descriptor in the core/src/main/resources/org/jspresso/hrsample/model/model.xml Spring context file. The definitions placed here can override/extend the SJS definitions. As a starting point, you can start from what's generated by SJS in core/target/generated-resources/dsl/org/jspresso/hrsample/model/dsl-model.xml and copy/paste/modify the entities descriptions. Here is an example using the City entity description of HR Sample (directly taken from generated dsl-model.xml). In bold red, the customizations :

  <bean id="City" class="org.jspresso.framework.model.descriptor.entity.basic.BasicEntityDescriptor">
  <bean id="City" class="your.custom.package.ExtendedEntityDescriptor">
    <constructor-arg value="org.jspresso.hrsample.model.City" />
    <property name="ancestorDescriptors">
      <list>
        <ref bean="Nameable" />
      </list>
    </property>
    <property name="iconImageURL" value="classpath:org/jspresso/hrsample/images/city-48x48.png" />
    <property name="propertyDescriptors">
      <list>
        <bean class="org.jspresso.framework.model.descriptor.basic.BasicStringPropertyDescriptor">
          <property name="name" value="zip" />
          <property name="maxLength" value="10" />
        </bean>
      </list>
    </property>
    <property name="legacyTable" value="T1_DBA">
    <property name="legacyPrimaryKeys">
      <list>
        <value>a</value>
        <value>b</value>
      </list>
    </property>
  </bean>

Now you have your custom description available for custom generation.

3/ Leverage your customizations using an extended Freemarker template to generate the new XDoclet tags

You can change the template used to generate the entity classes and then leverage the new properties you've added into your ExtendedEntityDescriptor.

Create a new template into your project core module (for instance core/src/main/resources/my/template/ExtendedEntityTemplate.ftl). Copy/paste the content of the default one. Modify the template to generate the new XDoclet tags based on the values of the legacyTable and legacyPrimaryKeys.

4/ Instruct the build to use the customized template

mvn -Dgenerator.templateResourcePath=/my/template -Dgenerator.templateName=ExtendedEntityTemplate.ftl clean package

Let us know how it goes !

Vincent

Hi Henrik,

You are right, my bad. You can't define the ExtendedEntityDescriptor class in the SAME module where you use it for entity generation (your project "core" module). This is due to the fact that the generator must have the ExtendedEntityDescriptor in its execution classpath. But the entity generation occurs BEFORE the "compile" phase, i.e. in the "generate-sources" phase, meaning that the ExtendedEntityDescriptor class is not yet available to the entity generator. So your "Event" entity is simply ignored since the generator can't know that this is an entity, since it doesn't now it's descriptor implementation class...

The solution is the following. You have to make your ExtendedEntityDescriptor either part of another maven project, e.g. a Jspresso extension project, which is the preferred way since it makes it independent and re-useable from your actual Jspresso projects, or you have to make another module in your exiting project. In both cases, the "core" module has to declare a Maven dependency towards the new Jspresso extension artifact (either project or module) so that it gets included in the classpath.

HTH,

Vincent