entitygen

This is an attempt to re-create some of the functionality of seam-gen; It consists of two main classes, FromDB and JenGen.

FromDB

FromDB reads the database metadata and writes a skeleton of the Entity POJO.

JenGen

JenGen reads the entity POJO and generates the five artifacts needed for a single-entity JSF list-detail application:

${Entity}Home.java
${Entity}List.java
${Entity}List.xhtml
${Entity}View.xhtml # the Detail page
${Entity}Edit.xhtml

HOWTO

Build everything: mvn package assembly:single
Install it somplace handy: cp entitygen-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar ~/lib/entitygen-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar
Change directory to where your entity is to be built: cd ~/workspace/myproject
Create ~/.db.properties with the details of the JDBC connection;
Run FromDB: java -classpath ~/lib/entitygen*.jar entitygen.FromDB dbConnName tableName [ClassName] (or via the fromdb script in my scripts repo)
Compile the generated Java classes
Run JenGen: java -jar ~/lib/entitygen*.jar target/classes model.MyEntity (or via the entitygen script in my scripts repo)
Examine ../entitygenoutput/*

Limitations/TODOs:

JenJen assumes you have already coded the Java Entity and it’s on your classpath; if not, use FromDB to generate it.
Should have better integration of FromDB and JenGen so you could do it all in one pass. Could use the compiler API to compile FromDB’s output?
Uses Field annotations rather than Accessor annotations; should be settable.
assumes a single level of inheritance for entities
assumes you want to use PrimeFaces UI.
assumes you don’t mind having the output stuck in ../entitygenoutput/
Does not yet handle relationships
Does not yet handle Enums
FromDB could do more work analyzing the table.
Whatever else I didn’t think of yet.

Some of these limitations will be easier or harder to remove than others. UTSL. Pull Requests welcome.

Pre-requisite for building

Apache Maven for building.

APIs used by this generator:

Code generation is done using Apache Velocity; you can edit the templates.
If using FromDB ensure your db driver is listed in pom.xml

APIs used by the generated pages at runtime:

darwinsys-ee API for EntityHome Another repo of mine; not in Central yet; clone it and do "mvn install" to install in your .m2/repository
Apache DeltaSpike Data for EntityList.

Alternative!

The existing Hibernate Tools probably does a better job of some of this, but it’s tied to Ant and/or Eclipse, and mine is a simpler, lower-startup approach. But see http://docs.jboss.org/tools/4.1.x.Final/en/hibernatetools/html_single/index.html and decide before you start.

As a completely alternative way of building the UI part of your application, consider use of MetaWidget, which builds a UI dynamically. It should be a good fit with the DeltaSpike Data UI layer.

IanDarwin/entitygen