Adventures in ORM

I've been spending a little time over the Christmas break working with toolsets I don't usually use. (I think this helps me better appreciate the tools I use, no matter what they are.) For the past couple of days I've been having a look at Java ORM solutions.

I had a quick look at Spring 3 / Hibernate 3, but hit some resistance in the form of strange errors I couldn't easily resolve. Sometimes in this case I'll just dig in and spend as much time as I have to, but in this case I decided to put down this toolkit and pick up another.

I've been doing a little work with the GlassFish application server, so I thought this would be a good chance to pick up NetBeans and make use of some of it's neat features. Every time I see the Sun folks talk, they really make NB look attractive, so I was hoping to find something good there.

Well.... I initially liked what I saw. I already had a PostGres database (also not my usual choice), so I made use of a cool code-gen feature to instantly make some Entity objects. Really easy!

The Entity beans weren't much use without a wrapper class to use them, so I also auto-generated (all this through right-click!) some Controller classes off the Entity beans. Also very easy!

Now just to hand-code a 'Main' and invoke the Controller classes. Much to my chagrin, all my nicely generated code didn't work. What was up?

A quick look at the log showed the query that was generated. Something like this:
select Name, Id from BC_Schema.BowlingCenters

That was a good clue. I knew from running hand-built queries that PostGres preferred something like this:
select "Name", "Id" from "BC_First_Schema"."BowlingCenters"

The difference was only the quotation marks. (Maybe this seems natural to PostGres users. I don't often use it, so it seemed odd to me.)

After quickly searching the web (thanks Google!) I found the quick cure was to doctor up the generated Entity class. Wherever an annotation referenced a keyword in the query, I added a backslash-double-quote to make it print the quotes when it gen'ed the query. Example:

@Column(name = "Id")

Was fixed to be:

@Column(name = "\"Id\"")

After that, I was able to quickly generate Entities and Controllers, building out a db-based application in no time. Very productive!

Probably the most valuable idea I got from the whole adventure was this:

When working with a new ORM setup, start out by coding a plain JDBC snippet to view a few rows. This will convince you you've got your credentials right, allowing you to work with fewer factors as you run down your initial bugs.

Happy Coding, and Merry Christmas!