Creating entities

Defining an entity

In Active Objects an entity is defined by an interface that extends the net.java.ao.RawEntity<T> interface. Here T defines the type of the primary key used for the entity.

In most cases, and this is advised to do so, your interfaces will extends net.java.ao.Entity instead of extending directly net.java.ao.RawEntity<T>. This interface defines for you the primary key as an Integer.

Entity is defined as follow:

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public interface Entity extends RawEntity<Integer>
{
    @AutoIncrement
    @NotNull
    @PrimaryKey("ID")
    public int getID();
}

Annotations here are self explanatory, but for good measure:

• @NotNull means that this member cannot be persisted as null,
• @PrimaryKey defines this member as the primary key of the entity, with the (column) name ID,
• @AutoIncrement tells that the primary key is an auto generated integer.

Here is a simple example of an entity that extends this class. This code is an extract from the dogfood blog:

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public interface Blog extends Entity
{
    public String getName();
    public void setName(String name);
}

Active Objects will take care of naming the table and column names according to the name of the interface and methods.

Creating an entity

Once an entity is defined, creating and persisting an object represented by that entity is very simple, given an EntityManager:

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private Blog createBlog() throws SQLException
{
    final Blog blog = entityManager.create(Blog.class); 
    blog.setName("Active Objects Dog Food Blog");
    blog.save();
    return blog;
}

This code can be found in the BlogService implementation of the DogFood blog

Creating an entity with "not null"-constraints

The previous way of creating an entity works only as long as there are no "not null"-constraints on fields other than the primary key. Consider the case of someone adding a field to the sample entity:

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public interface Blog extends Entity
{
    public String getName();
    public void setName(String name);

    @NotNull
    public String getAuthor();
    public void setAuthor(String author);
}

Now, calling entityManager.create(Blog.class); will not work, since the author field needs to be provided. The create call accepts parameters as well, so the code would look like this:

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private Blog createBlog() throws SQLException
{     
    return entityManager.create(
        Blog.class, 
        new DBParam("NAME", "Active Objects Dog Food Blog"),
        new DBParam("AUTHOR", "Dog Blogger")
    );
}

The column names are used here, so they must conform to the Column names convention.