I would like to create a class, which would be loadable and saveable to an XML file. I want to use one class which is doing the loading task and I want to integrate it with the actual class that I want to save and load, everything seems to be doable up to the point where JAVA doesn't allow the class instance to be change from within the class, i.e. there is no:
this = JAXBLoader.load();
So currently that's the problem I'm facing.
And I want to be able to control the loading and saving it via the public methods from the class itself, so that from the outside I don't need any factories or managers to load it. Currently the only solution I've seen to this was if I extended the class that I want to save as an xml and then delegate all the methods to the intance of the actual class and then when loading a new instance from the file, the instance would get replaced. But it is a bit of overhead to have to delegate all of the methods, especially pain in the ass if you need to add new methods to the class and have multiple implementations...
So are there any good practices or patterns on achieving something similar or solving the problem I demonstrated above? Actually I'm open, if somebody can overall share what are the best ways to do class saving and loading the easiest ways I would really glad about it.
I'm not quite sure why do you want to avoid external factories and managers. For me it seems quite natural to extract serialization and not handle it in the model classes themselves. But okay.
What I understood is that your core problem is to load data into this instance. Here's a simple way to achieve this with JAXB.
I'm the author of JAXB2 Basics, a plugin package for JAXB/XJC. It contains the copyable plugin which generates a few copyTo methods in the schema-derived classes.
This will give you methods like copyTo(Object target). With this you can first unmarshal data from XML into some temporary instance and then copyTo(this). Something like:
MyType temporaryInstance = unmarshaller.unmarshal(source, MyType.class).getValue();
temporaryInstance.copyTo(this);
You can add this method to your schema-derived code via code injection or by subclassing.
Related
I have a Kotlin object that has several fields exposed as static #JvmFields. The parser that I use (which I cannot edit or change) looks for public static fields and creates a configuration file based on those. Since the INSTANCE field is public too, the parser generates a new category called instance. Is there a way to add actual annotations to the INSTANCE field? I would want to add the #Ingore annotation to it so the parser does not use the INSTANCE field.
Basically, the answer is no, Kotlin does not allow annotating or altering the INSTANCE fields in any other way. If you believe this could be a useful feature, please file a feature request at kotl.in/issue.
The valid solutions to this problem are:
Make the bytecode analyzing tool Kotlin-aware, i.e. make it behave correctly with Kotlin declarations. Though this requires non-trivial job to be done and does not seem possible in your case, it could be a valuable time investment.
Create another ad-hoc tool that post-processes the classes produced by the Kotlin compiler and adds the annotations you need, then include that tool into your build.
We have some portion of functionality packed in an external library and it is attached to our project. That library can't be changed in any way. Amongst others there are two classes lying inside it: com.myorg.Grandpa and com.myorg.Dad that extends com.myorg.Grandpa. Also there are com.myorg.Grandson extending com.myorg.Dad and a few other classes outside of the library extending com.myorg.Grandpa.
I decompile com.myorg.Grandpa class and add a new method new_method() to it.
Then I try to use new_method() in com.myorg.Grandson but IDEA won't let me do it cause Grandson extends Dad which extends library's Grandpa which doesn't contain new_method().
I tried to delete Grandpa from library and surprisingly IDEA didn't say a word and successfully compiled a project despite of the fact that in the boundaries of a library Dad extends non existing class.
The question is how to force Dad to extend a new Grandpa without deleting the one inside a library?
You could
Add an abstract class between Dad and GrandSon: Extend Dad, and add your method in the sub class. Then derive GrandSon from that sub class.
Put an instance of Dad in a new class, and let your IDE create delegate methods to the aggregated Dad instance. Again add your new method to the new class.
There is another possibility:
If you have to modify classes in place, use aspectj to weave in code: aspectj changes the byte-code (it does not need source code) at run-time. This way you can add methods or fields.
The fact is that you are duplicating classes with full package signature, so you will get the one that the classloader loads first. I know that in Websphere you can tweak classloader priorities, but couldn't say in your case.
Anyway, why not just do it without decompiling? You are causing yourself hard coupling to an external library and bad practices (maybe copyright issues) by decompiling/customizing. Besides, if the library gets updated, you will run into trouble having to reconstruct your customized classes.
Options:
Create your own implementation, for instance:
Create an Interface that replicates all methods in Grandpa plus the one you need.
Extend Grandpa class and implement the added method from your interface, all other methods will be left intact.
Extend all other extending classes from your own class hierarchie.
Instead of using the libraries common class, use your Interface as naming
This way you are kind of creating your own interface to the library, if it changes, you know where to make changes.
You could even do it without the interface, it's kind of wrapping the functionality, it would depend on what you need to achieve.
Anyway, I would try to solve it by own code and not by messing up with the library, it is just not worth it to do such tricks, if a new Programmer takes the project, they will need a lot of time to find out why and how it behaves.
Now, there might be variations in how to structure the class hierarchie, but it would depend on the specific implementation you need, so you would have to post more detailed data on what the library is and what you're trying to add to it if you expect some more specific answer...
Regards
It has to appear first to the class loader.
IDEA should load your class first if is in your project. You may also try to create a separate library for your class and include it in your project.
See also: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/configuring-module-dependencies-and-libraries.html
Need to serialize java objects to JSON while doing compression such as name change, exclusion etc. Objects use class from jar, source code of which is not available.
Looked through many libraries(Jackson , Gson), but found none solving this particular problem. Most of them are annotations based, which I can't use given I don't have source code.
One way to solve this problems is, use reflection and recursively go through object until you find a property name of which should be replaced or object is excluded in serialized JSON.
Need solution for this. Better if it is already implemented and tested.
You can also have a look at Genson library http://code.google.com/p/genson/.
You can rename and filter with quite concise code:
// renames all "fieldOfName" to "toName", excludes from serialization
// and deserialization fields named "fieldNamed" and declared in DefinedInClass
// and uses fields with all visibility (protected, private, etc)
Genson genson = new Genson.Builder().rename("fieldOfName", "toName")
.exclude("fieldNamed", DefinedInClass.class)
.setFieldFilter(VisibilityFilter.ALL)
.create();
genson.serialize(myObject);
If you want to do some more complex filtering (based on annotations for example) you can implement BeanMutatorAccessorResolver or extend BaseResolver.
Same for property renaming you can implement PropertyNameResolver and have full control.
And finally if you want to filter fields, methods or constructors according to their modifiers you can define your own VisiblityFilter.
Concerning performances of filtering/renaming there should be no problem as it is done only once per class and then cached.
To start using Genson you can have a look at the Getting Started Guide.
Found solution to the problem.
Google gson has class called GsonBuilder which has methods for exclusion strategy and naming strategy.
Using these two methods implemented a custom solution, where all the mapping and exclusion rules are stored using a xml and used at the time of serialization and de-serialization.
Works perfectly, though not sure about the performance of same.
I have basic knowledge of Java's reflection API - therefore, this is not only a question of how, it's a question of whether it's possible and whether I'm going about a solution the best way.
We're doing some acceptance testing of multiple, interrelated projects; each of these projects retrieve data from a MongoDB store using an in-house abstraction API. To facilitate this testing, each component needs some pre-loaded data to be available in the database.
I'm building a command-line tool to accept a DTO (pre-compiled class binary), for loading of multiple instances using the morphia ORM library. I would like each member of our team to be able to run the generator passing in via cli their DTO (in jar or directory form), and a file (csv or otherwise) for instantiating a desired amount of records.
I have the class loading working fine with URLClassLoader. Now I'm trying to instantiate an instance of this class using data from a file.
Is this possible? Would serialized objects be a better approach?
That's perfectly possible using the Java Reflection API :
Load Class instance by name (Class.forName(className), you don't really need the ClassLoader instance)
Grab Constructor instance of constructors have parameters and invoke newInstance(Object... args) on this constructor instance to create an instance of your DTO class.
Invoke getDeclaredFields() on your Class instance and iterate over them to set their values (field.set(instance, value)). Make sure to invoke field.setAccessible(true) to be able to access private fields.
If by "serialized objects" you mean canned instances, then no, by loading properties from a text file you allow much easier tweaking of test data (if that's a goal), including the number of objects.
But sure, it's possible; unmarshal the data from the input file and use it to initialize or construct the object in question like you would in regular code.
Is there a feasible way to get my own code run whenever any class is loaded in Java, without forcing the user explicitly and manually loading all classes with a custom classloader?
Without going too much into the details, whenever a class implementing a certain interface read its annotation that links it with another class, and give the pair to a third class.
Edit: Heck, I'll go to details: I'm doing an event handling library. What I'm doing is having the client code do their own Listener / Event pairs, which need to be registered with my library as a pair. (hm, that wasn't that long after all).
Further Edit: Currently the client code needs to register the pair of classes/interfaces manually, which works pretty well. My intent is to automate this away, and I thought that linking the two classes with annotations would help. Next, I want to get rid of the client code needing to keeping the list of registrations up to date always.
PS: The static block won't do, since my interface is bundled into a library, and the client code will create further interfaces. Thus, abstract classes won't do either, since it must be an interface.
If you want to base the behavior on an interface, you could use a static initializer in that interface.
public interface Foo{
static{
// do initializing here
}
}
I'm not saying it's good practice, but it will definitely initialize the first time one of the implementing classes is loaded.
Update: static blocks in interfaces are illegal. Use abstract classes instead!
Reference:
Initializers (Sun Java Tutorial)
But if I understand you right, you want the initialization to happen once per implementing class. That will be tricky. You definitely can't do that with an interface based solution. You could do it with an abstract base class that has a dynamic initializer (or constructor), that checks whether the requested mapping already exists and adds it if it doesn't, but doing such things in constructors is quite a hack.
I'd say you cleanest options are either to generate Code at build time (through annotation processing with apt or through bytecode analysis with a tool like asm) or to use an agent at class load time to dynamically create the mapping.
Ah, more input. Very good. So clients use your library and provide mappings based on annotations. Then I'd say your library should provide an initializer method, where client code can register classes. Something like this:
YourLibrary.getInstance().registerMappedClasses(
CustomClass1.class,
CustomClass2.class,
CustomClass3.class,
CustomClass4.class
)
Or, even better, a package scanning mechanism (example code to implement this can be found at this question):
YourLibrary.getInstance().registerMappedClassesFromPackages(
"com.mycompany.myclientcode.abc",
"com.mycompany.myclientcode.def"
)
Anyway, there is basically no way to avoid having your clients do that kind of work, because you can't control their build process nor their classloader for them (but you could of course provide guides for classloader or build configuration).
If you want some piece of code to be run on any class loading, you should:
overwrite the ClassLoader, adding your own custom code at the loadClass methods (don't forget forwarding to the parent ClassLoader after or before your custom code).
Define this custom ClassLoader as the default for your system (here you got how to do it: How to set my custom class loader to be the default?).
Run and check it.
Depending on what kind of environment you are, there are chances that not all the classes be loaded trouugh your custom ClassLoader (some utility packages use their own CL, some Java EE containers handle some spacific areas with specific classLoaders, etc.), but it's a kind of aproximation to what you are asking.