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How to apply code logic to database records/values?

I'm maintaining a system (in Java, with Tomcat, Spring MVC, and Hibernate) where I have to set access rules for user groups. These rules are saved in a database (PostgreSQL) as records / rows. The logic is very simple. Each user of a company's team belongs (is connected) to a group, and each group has a set of rules.
I have to allow administrators to configure (through a web application) rules for groups, so that each rule has a logic and this is recognized and reproduced on the server side.
I need to define rules with parameters, such as:
Authentications only weekends.
Authentications only on weekdays.
Authentications only at a certain time (from time X to time Y).
X authentications per day.
Account expiration from date X
And so on...
My intention is that the company team can organize itself dynamically, just setting up any rules they want at any time, without the need for maintenance every time their policies change.
I've been searching on google and found nothing about it. I know I can do this in Java code, I would have to tie Java code with values of rules names present in database, something that could change in the future (or between companies), and this does not seem right to me. I'm not sure if this is correct, or preferable (maintainable). I appreciate any suggestions, ideas, or corrections (for real).
Note: Team/Groups names may change, but its rules should remain the same (if desired).
EDIT
The database is already modeled and ready. Groups and rules represent values from two different tables, with no logic at all. Querying these values works trivial. However, as I'm maintaining a web application, I'm in charge of creating a code or procedure that applies logic to the choice of rule values.
I was very clear in my question, but I will add more things:
Imagine that my clients (companies) want a website (a web application) that can manage their employees. Every company has teams of employees (groups), each with its function. Otherwise, some employees are sometimes hired as temporary employees.
My duty is to restrict access to the accounts of users who are part of company teams. This will allow business leaders to restrict things according to their policies.
For any company, the process works something like this:
The person in charge defines groups (with names and descriptions).
The same person defines restrictions rules for each group.
User accounts are created and linked to groups with rules.
The accounts are given (assigned) to each person part of the company
team, each according to their function.
Why should this be done?
Management
Control
Security
Speaking more technically now, I do not know where or how I should implement this properly. I know of a way to accomplish this, which is in programming code (Java, in my case), but again, I do not know if this is appropriate.
I also know that it is possible to define users and groups on the database side. But creating and deleting such definitions for each time an employee is hired or his or her length of service is expired can not become practical. My intention is to avoid to the maximum that companies have to spend more money on maintenance (Although sometimes this is obviously impossible).
My question based on a real case can be answered indicating to me an ideal way / approach for this type of scenario, either the solution being something that should be implemented in the database, or something done in the application layer, or both, or something else (I do not have experience to solve this kind of situation properly, so I'm here).
For practical purposes, I have decided to describe what technologies I am using in this system. If you want more information, I'll be happy to show you here.
Also, as this is a question that covers a larger context, not specifically databases, and also not specifically web applications, I have decided to put it here (instead of other StackExchange communities).
Thank you.

Design pattern for java wrapper for Jquery datatables

I have found the Jquery datatables plug in extremely useful for simple, read only applications where I'd like to give the user pagination, sorting and searching of very large sets of data (millions of rows using server side processing).
I have a system for reusing this code but I end up doing the same thing over and over alot. I'd like to write a very generalized api that I essentially just need to configure the sql needed to retrieve the data used in the table. I am looking for a good design pattern/approach to do this. I've seen articles like this http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/359750/jQuery-DataTables-in-Java-Web-Applications and have a complete understanding of how server side processing works (have done it in java and asp.net many times). For someone to answer you will probably need to have a deep understanding of how server side processing works in java but here are some issues that come up with attempting to do this:
I generally run three separate queries. A count without the search clause, a count with the clause included, the query for the actual data. I haven't found an efficient way to do all 3 at once and doing so requires a lot of extra data to come back from db (ie counts over and over). The api needs to support behavior based on these three different queries and complex queries at that. I generally row number () over an index for the pagination to be relatively speedy with large data.
*where clause changes dynamically (user can search over a variable number of rows).
*order by clause changes for the same reason.
overall, each case is often pretty specific to the data we need. Is there a good way to abstract this so that I can do minimal work when I want to use the plug in server side.
So, the steps are as follows in most projects:
*extract the params the plug on sends to the server (alot of times my own are added, mostly date ranges)
*build the unfiltered count query (this is rarely dynamic).
*build the filtered count query (is dynamic)
*build the data query
*construct a model object of the table and return it as json.
A lot of the issues occur setting the prepared statements with a variable number of parameters. Dynamically generating the sql in a general way (say based on just column names) seems unlikely. I am wondering if someone else has created something they are using for this or if it sounds like a specific pattern is applicable. It has just occurred to me that creating a reusable filter may be helpful in java. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to be language agnostic as the architecture is what I'm trying to figure out.

We have base search criteria where all request parameters relevant to DataTables are mapped onto class properties (fields) and custom search criteria class that extends base and contains specific to business logic fields for sutom search. Also on server side we have repository class that takes custom search criteria as an argument and makes queries to database.
If you are familiar with C#, you could check out custom binding code and example of usage.
You could do such custom binding in your Java code as well.

Content searching in a web application

I want to do a content search in my database. And the requirement is it has to be like a google search completely based on Ajax. Can you guys suggest me any framework or architecture or any kind of idea?
Example:
Employee Table contains Employee First Name, Last Name , Middle Name and Email. I have to search the table by providing any one of the field and the details of that employee should be populated

Consider using an index-based search engine. Apache Lucene is immensely popular, high-performant and well documented.

There are different parts to your question:
1) Ajax library: you could use Jquery which provides simple ajax methods http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.ajax/
2) On the server end there are a couple of options depending on the type of database youre using. Is it relational, is it nosql? Is your choice of database flexible or is it set in stone?
Lucene provides a query language for an index with more complex information and search requirements. But if your use case is as simple as the one above, you might just shoot off different SQL queries (assuming your database is relational).

how to create "has many" between two documents in couchdb?

basically I am wondering how you would go about in Couchdb as you would in MysQL: storing username, password in one table and link the user id as foreign key on another table of tasks?
should I just use mysql for the user authentication part and couchdb to store lots of user submitted documents? so create a random unique token to link each user to their "documents" on couchdb?
also I am looking to store Java objects to the couchdb, and retrieve them to be used directly in my application. which Java-couchdb library does this? Ektorp's example is seems more complicated compared to couchdb4j.

I do not know Java very well, but I suggest use the most simple tool you find. CouchDB is very simple and usually it is most beneficial to access it with simple tools too.
Yes, if you will have many relationships in the data, MySQL will help. However CouchDB can do some simple has-many queries.
First, there is view collation. You use map/reduce, and for every "child" document, you emit a key pointing to the parent document. When you query for ?key=parent then you get a long list of children. (The wiki explains it pretty well.)
Secondly, I suggest the article What's new in CouchDB 0.11 which shows how to use document _ids to link between two documents.
Good luck!

Creating friendly urls to dynamic resources in struts2

I have a struts2 application with a single page that may show one of a number of values stored in a database. The application is for a school with many departments and each department has many programs. The department page is accessed using a url like this
department.action?id=2
and the DepartmentAction will load the Department with id = 2 for display. All this is fine if the user is just browsing around the site but it gets uncomfortable if I want to provide a link to say the Engineering department in the newspapers. The link will have to be www.myschooldomain.com/department.action?id=2. I see a number of problems with this.
First, it is not user friendly. Second, it is prone to be broken because the departments are dynamically maintained and the id for a department could change without warning making the link unstable.
I would prefer to print a url like this: www.myschooldomain.com/department/engineering and have that somehow go to department.action?id=2.
My thoughts so far: create an action that will parse the url for the department name at the end then look it up by name. Maybe I could add a friendlyurl field to the database for each department.
But the question is: Is there a better way to do this in struts2?
Thanks.
Update (May 2009): I just happened to stumble back over this question and thought that I would say what I did to solve it.
I created a new package in the struts.xml called departments. In this package there is only one action mapped to *. So it catches all requests to mydomain.com/departments/anything.html.
In the action class I simply parse the url and look for the part between departments/ and .html and that is the name of the department so I can do a lookup in the database for it. This has been working fine for almost 5 months now and I have implemented it for other areas of the site.

You could use the URL Rewrite filter
This avoids the need for any additional servlet or Java code but requires XML descriptors.

This is normally done by mapping a servlet to, in your case '/department', and then using the path information (e.g., '/engineering') within the servlet to determine the ID.
Since the Struts2 dispatcher doesn't implement this behavior, it might be simplest to write your own servlet. This servlet would be configured with a map of valid "friendly" names to the unfriendly numeric identifiers. This could be an actual Map or it could be done with a database finder method.
The result of getPathInfo() would be used to look up the ID, and the request would be forwarded to the department.action. Handle the null case too, which means the user is trying to browse the /departments/ directory.