DbOomManager

DbOomManager is a manager responsible for registering entity types and holding various configuration information. It is used by various parts of Db and DbOom, therefore it is created as singleton pattern. Although we are not in love with singleton pattern, this time we made an exception, in order to make DbOom usage easier. Moreover, DbOom is designed to work with single database, so using singleton in this case makes sense.

Types registration

Anytime when some types are specified in DbOomQuery methods, they are examined and parsed and these results are stored internally in DbOomManager. This kind of registration is called types registration since only class information is registered in manager. This means that more then one entity types may be mapped to single database table. In other words, this is one way mapping:

Entity → Table, Entity name

Types may be registered manually, although there is no much need for that, since, as said, all this anyway happens internally.

Entity registration

To use the full potential of DbOom, all entity classes should be registered as entities in the DbOomManager before the usage. Entity registration supersede the type registration: types and tables now becomes mapped in both ways:

Entity ↔ Table, Entity name

Now each table name is also uniquely registered with one and only one entity. While it is still possible to register more types to tables, it is not possible to register one table name to more then one entities. DbOomQuery will throw exception if that happens.

Automatic registration

Since entities must be registered manually, there is nice way how all annotated classes on class path can be registered automatically. This is done by using AutomagicDbOomConfigurator. It scans the class path and jar files (or part of it, as specified by user) and finds all classes annotated with @DbTable. No class is loaded in class loader unless it contains correct bytecode.

AutomagicDbOomConfigurator offers both way of registration.

Resolving entities

One of the benefits of entity registration is the feature of resolving the entities just from the result set meta data. In all DbOomQuery examples, each method accepts explicit list of (entity) classes to which the result set will be mapped. Now it is possible to omit the list and let DbOomQuery resolve classes by itself:

    DbOomQuery q = new DbOomQuery(session,
        "select * from GIRL join BOY on... where...");
    Girl girl = q.findOne(Girl.class);  // ok
    Girl girl = (Girl) q.findOne();     // throws an exception

    DbOomManager.getInstance().registerEntity(Girl.class);
    Girl girl = (Girl) q.findOne();     // now it works

To some this feature is useful, others doesn't use since it is not so visible what is the target entity.