[Hibernate-devel] MappingByReflection release

[Doug C. <de...@fl...>]

I have made the first release of MappingByReflection to the cvs.

MappingByReflection is a command line tool for creating an O-R Mapping
XML from the .class files of the classes to be persisted. It is still
incomplete, and undoubtedly has problems, but I would appreciate it if
you tried to use it and report any problems you experience to this
list. See known limitations and problems below.

There is no user documentation yet, but there is some javadoc in the
file cirrus/hibernate/tools/reflect/MappingByReflection.java.

MappingByReflection takes a list of fully specified classes, which
must be compiled and present on classpath, and produces the O-R
Mapping. The classes can be specified on the command line, or in an
interactive loop. One advantage of the interactive loop is that you
can specify the UID of each class individually; this makes it possible
to put subclasses in separate tables. I plan to add this capability to
the command line version shortly.

If anyone would like to volunteer to add a GUI face to
MappingByReflection I would be delighted to support you.

It is only necessary to specify the "fringe" of the class inheritance
tree to get all necessary superclasses added to the mapping.
MappingByReflection chases the superclass chain until it finds the
specified or default UID property. See javadoc for details.

MappingByReflection uses several heuristics to decide the type of each
property. Again, the javadoc tells all.

Known limitations and problems...

- non-primitive array elements are not handled correctly
  (this will be fixed soon)
- no lazy attribute for collections
  (should be the default? this will be fixed soon)
- no length attribute for string/blob/binary/serializable
  (should be the default? this will be fixed soon)
- no toplevel collections
  (I don't know any way to find them by reflection)
- cannot see inside Set Map or List properties
  (this is a feature of hibernate's opaque lazy collections)

I *will* add more options for the GUI if you ask. In particular, there
is already provision for per class customization of the select mode,
the depth of component recursion, and the candidate UIDs.

Have fun!

e