A way to generate code from an instance of a Java Object - java

I know that HashCode is a way, but I've noticed that after a while the HashCode change. So, I have an application that permit to buy things, every article is identified by a code generated by now from the hashcode and stored in the db PostgreSQL, but I have discovered this issue so I can't use it. Infact the next day that I try to identify this article on the db the hashcode changed so it doesn't works. What is a solution? Thanks a lot!
My object that generate code for article is something like this
public class AcquistoDVDRichiesto implements IsSerializable, CustomEnum {
private int codice_carrello;
private String utente;
private int numero;
private String film;
private int fornitura;
public AcquistoDVDRichiesto(){}
public AcquistoDVDRichiesto(int c, String user){
utente=user;
codice_carrello=c;
}
public void generateCodeBasket(){
if(film!=null && numero!=0 && fornitura!=0){
codice_carrello=Math.abs(film.hashCode()+((Integer)numero).hashCode()+
((Integer)fornitura).hashCode()+tipo_supporto.DVD.hashCode());
}
}
}
-

You shouldn't generate db primary keys by hand. The best approach is to let the database generate the unique primary keys for each record. This way you can be sure that there will be no primary key collisions and the codes will not change.
In PostreSQL, you can use a SERIAL column type to achieve that. Example:
CREATE TABLE tablename (
colname SERIAL
);
The other way is to use a sequence, but it is a bit more complicated.

Related

What's the proper way of generating a unique field using Spring Boot / JPA?

First of all, I'm not taking about the primary id of the record. I'm talking about an field that is used by users to identify the record that's automatically generated but changeable by the user, not sequential and not a UUID. For example, starting with an account entity:
#Entity
#Data
class Account {
#Id
#GeneratedValue
private int id;
#Column(unique=true)
#NotNull
private String slug;
#Column
private String name;
}
and then I simply create a record:
#Autowired
private AccountRepository accountRepository;
Account account = new Account();
account.setName("ACME");
accountRepository.saveAndFlush(account);
At that point, the slug should have been generated, either completely randomly, or by doing something based on the name. How should that be done?
I know without locking the whole table it's impossible to ensure that the insertion won't result in an exception due to the uniqueness constrain being violated. I'm actually OK blocking the whole table or even letting the exception happen (you need a lot of requests per second fora conflict to happen between the check for availability and the insert).
If you separate the slug from the Account table and put it in a (id, slug) table by itself, you can generate the slug first (retrying until you succeed) and then persist the Account with a link to the just generated slug id.
You can't achieve this in a #PrePersist method, so your service needs to create the slug whenever you're creating an new Account. However it does simplify things on the application side (e.g. you don't need to wonder which constraint was violated when persisting an Account).
Depending on your other code, you can also get around locking the Account table and even the Slug table if you go for the optimistic approach.
A pseudo-code example of a service method that creates a new account (providing new Slug() creates the random slug):
#Autowired SlugRepository slugRepository;
#Autowired AccountRepository accountRepository;
public void createAccount(Account a) {
Slug s = null;
while(s == null) {
try {
s = slugRepository.save(new Slug());
} catch(Exception e) {
}
}
a.setSlug(s);
accountRepository.save(a);
}
I can think of JPA callbacks to generate the slug. In your case #PrePersist could be useful.
That said, why you need to make sure the value is available with a select before inserting the record, so the window for a collision to occur is tiny? You do have unique constraint on the column, right?
Update
Personally I would prefer to address it like this:
Use JPA callback #PrePersist when generating the the slug. Use to random UUID or timestamp to minimise the possibility of collision. No checking for collision as chances are minimal.
When updating the Account for user generated slug, always check first using query for collision. This check will offcourse happen in service update method itself.
This way I can be DB agnostic and also don't have to use repository/service in entity or listener classes.
I will do something like a separate Bean, helper or service class like this.
public class SlugService {
public String generateSlug(String slug)
{
if (accountRepo.getBySlug(slug) != null){ //check if it is already
return slug
} else {
slug.append("-"); //whatever the syntax
generateSlug();
}
}
public String makeSlug()
{
String slug = split by " ", replace by "_"(accountObject.getName);
generateSlug(slug)
}
}
Call the makeSlug(); method.

Need to know if each field has changed, how should I model this in Hibernate

So I have a class with three fields that maps to a table using hibernate
Class Widget
{
String field1;
String field2;
String field3;
}
On application startup a number of instances these widgets will be added to the database from an external files, but when I exit the application I need to know which (if any) of these fields have been changed by the user since the application was started, so the changes can be saved back to the files. I also need to store the original value for logging purposes.
I can't work whether I need a status field in the table or whether there is already a way of doing this using Hibernate/Database.
EDIT:A good solution to the program was given below . however the main reason I am using Hibernate is to reduce memory consumption so storing the original values when changed is not a good solution for me , I want everthing stored in the database. So I have create this new question How do I store a copy of each entity I add to database in Hibernate
Given an entity like the following you can track changes on one of it's field (while preserving its original value too).
#Entity
#Table(schema = "test", name = "test")
public final class Test {
private static final int ORIGINAL = 0;
private static final int CURRENT = 1;
private Integer id;
// holds the original and current state of the field
private final AtomicReferenceArray<String> field = new AtomicReferenceArray<>(2);
#Id
public Integer getId() {
return id;
}
public void setId(Integer id) {
this.id = id;
}
#Transient
public String getOriginalField() {
return field.get(ORIGINAL);
}
#Basic
public String getField() {
return field.get(CURRENT);
}
public void setField(String field) {
this.field.compareAndSet(ORIGINAL, null, field);
this.field.set(CURRENT, field);
}
#PreUpdate
public void preUpdate() {
System.out.format("Original: %s, New: %s\n", getOriginalField(), getField());
}
...
}
If there is a single row in a database like this:
id: 1
field: a
version: 2011-12-02 11:24:00
before the field gets updated (say, from a to b) you'll get the following output.
Original: d, New: b
The original value gets preserved even if the the entity is updated multiple times and both state can be accessed through the corresponding getters (getField and getOriginalField—you can get more creative than me in the naming :).
This way, you can spare yourself from creating version columns in your database and also can hide the implementation details from clients.
Instead of an AtomicReferenceArray you could use arrays, lists, etc, to track all changes like this way.
The #PreUpdate isn't necessary of course, but this way you can be notified of changes in the entity's state and atomically save the updated fields into file. There more annotations like these: see the documentation for javax.persistence for other annotation types.
If you are using MySql then you can get table's last update time from information_schema database like
SELECT UPDATE_TIME FROM `information_schema`.`tables`
WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = 'dbName' AND TABLE_NAME = 'tableName'
Or else simple solution will be to add a column for update time stamp. By this you can even monitor which particular row has been updated.
If you need to synchronize with files as soon as you save into database, You can use the Hibernate event mechanism to intercept any save to database and save it to file, here's a sample doing that.

Best practice for storing global data in J2EE App using Hibernate

I'm looking for the best solution to store Java EE application's global data using Hibernate. It will consist of key value pairs. Example:
projectStarted = "10-11-11"
developerNumber = 3
teamLeader = "John"
As you see, all of this entries have different types.
For now I see two options:
1) Create GlobalData entity. Each field of it will be represented as unique column in the table and will contain unique setting. This way I have no problems with type casting, but I would like to avoid it in case where there will be big amount of settings.
2) Create Setting entity. Each of it will contain two fields: key(Primary key) and value and will be represented as unique record in the table. This is preferable solution, but It's seems to me that I will get a lot of type casting, because settings can be any type.
So basically, I'm looking for the way to implement second solution without getting a lot of troubles from different types. Can anybody help me?
Thanks.
Edit 1.
Yeah, thanks Christian. Just got similar idea.
What if I will have Settings entity, which will be like:
#Entity
#Table(name = "settings")
public class Setting {
#Column
private String key;
#Column
private String value;
#Column
private String converterClassFullName; //example by.lugovsky.MyConverter
//Getters, setters
}
And GlobalData class.
public class GlobalData {
private Date projectStarted;
private int developerNumber;
private String teamLeader;
Set<Setting> settings;
//Getters and setters for all, except settings.
}
So basically my idea is to convert Setting entity before persisting/updating/ etc. I can do this in my DAO, but I was wondering, if I could annotate GlobalData class with #Entity annotation as well without creating new table. This way I can set OneToMany annotation to Setting's set and Perform conversions in the internal #PrePersist etc. methods.
Will Hibernate allow me to do this?
Thanks again
You could store a Converter-Class into the db and the let it run through the given converter for a property before using the value. JSF offers Converter API:
public interface Converter{
public Object getAsObject(FacesContext fc, UIComponent component, String value) throws ConverterException;
public String getAsString(FacesContext fc, UIComponent component, Object obj) throws ConverterException;
}
If you have a schema with
name: String
value: String
converter: Class
then you could do something like this:
PropertyEntry pe = // Get from OR-Mapper
Converter c = (Converter) pe.getConverter().newInstance();
Object o = c.getAsObject(null, null, pe.getValue());
// use the object o instead of value
For even more coolness you could also define a field in the class which will not be persisted which you could use to hold the converted value within the object.

What data structure should I use for object storage, for easily generating primary keys for new entries?

I'm doing a school project in Java and I the following question have arisen:
I have an entity with attributes - id, name, phone.. with id as the unique primary key. I want to store them in a data structure(such as list..). Then in the application I obtain the data for creating a new instance (name, phone..) and I want to create a new instance of the entity and store it in my data structure with a new unique id. The id shouldn't be random, it would be best if the id rised continuously with the size of the list. Also I dont want to reuse ids.
The first implementation that comes to my mind is to use ArrayList and simply set id as indexes. But ArrayList.remove(int index) after removal shifts all following elements to left. I assume that ArrayList.remove(Object o) works the same, but i would be gratefull i I'm proven wrong. Determining ids from last element would not work either. I could go through all of them but that seems inefiicient.
Thanks in advance for any help :)
You want to keep a counter for them. You could use a static value in the class (you may need to synchronize it for multi-threaded classes.)
import java.util.concurrent.atomic.AtomicInteger;
class MyClass {
// thread safe
private static final AtomicInteger safeCounter = new AtomicInteger();
private final int uniqueId; // can never change uniqueId
private String name; // the data of the class
public MyClass(String name) {
this.name = name;
this.uniqueId = MyClass.safeCounter.getAndIncrement();
}
public boolean equals(Object o) {
if(o instanceof MyClass) { // instanceof also does null check :-)
MyClass mc = (MyClass)o;
return mc.uniqueId == this.uniqueId;
}
return false;
}
public int hashCode() {
return uniqueId;
}
}
If this is for homework, or if threadsafety isn't a concern, you can use a simple static int
class MyClass {
private static int nextUniqueId() {
int result = counter;
counter++;
return result;
}
// not thread safe
private static int counter;
private final int uniqueId; // can never change uniqueId
private String name; // the data of the class
public MyClass(String name) {
this.name = name;
this.uniqueId = nextUniqueId();
}
public boolean equals(Object o) {
if(o instanceof MyClass) { // instanceof also does null check :-)
MyClass mc = (MyClass)o;
return mc.uniqueId == this.uniqueId;
}
return false;
}
public int hashCode() {
return uniqueId;
}
}
How about using a Factory that users a Strategy for generating your identifiers?
Edited to answer question about factories
A Factory is a design pattern that is used to encapsulate the creation of different types of Objects. A Strategy is another design pattern that is used to encapsulate the behavior of specific business logic that might have different rules or that might change over time.
In your case you clearly require a new Identifier for each object that needs to be unique. You also stated in your question comments above that eventually you will be storing your objects in a database, which also would most likely require you to get your identifier from your database in the long run.
Here is a smallish example of using a Factory to create your User Objects instead of just using new(). Please kindly disregard any spelling or compile mistakes, I wrote the following code with out the assistance of a compiler or IDE.
public interface UserFactory {
User createUser();
}
public interface IdentifierStrategy {
// I just picked Long for ease of use.
Long getIdentifier();
}
public class UserFactoryImpl {
private final IdentifierStrategy identifierStrategy;
public UserFactoryImpl(final IdentifierStrategy identifierStrategy) {
this.identifierStrategy = identifierStrategy;
}
public User createUser() {
Long identifier = this.identifierStrategy.getIdentifier();
User user = new User(identifier);
return user;
}
}
public class LongIdentifierStrategy implements IdentifierStrategy {
public Long getIdentifier() {
// Do something here that will return a unique long.
Long long = new Long(1);
return long;
}
}
// In the long term, you would most likely use this IdentiferStrategy
// to get your identifiers from the database.
public class JDBCIdentifierStrategy implements IdentifierStrategy {
public Long getIdentifer() {
// Get a jdbc connection from a jdbc connection pool.
// Get the next identifier from the databsae.
Long long = new Long(1);
return long;
}
}
Now, in the long run, if your requirement change for how you need to identifier your User objects, you would only need to write a new IdentifierStrategy and update your UserFactoryImpl with that new Strategy.
One important question: what's the scope of the uniqueness?
Just for the duration of a run of the application? Do you have a single thread or multiple threads, so unique across those threads? Or could there be several copies of the app running at the same time, so unique across all instances, even across many machines? Will you save the data somewhere and so need uniqueness across future runs of the program too?
Two fundamental schemes:
a). use a database, they usually offer some kind of auto-generated primary key: you insert the record, it gives you a unique key.
b). generate the key yourself, in this case: first isolate the key generation to it's own class, then you can make the generation as clever as you wish. Sketch:
some initialisation, generate an initial value, simple case it's zero, or it derives from the current date/time, or MAC address of your machine, or whatever
provide a getNextId() function, which probably needs to be synchronized if threads are involved.
A very simple scheme, which will be OK for low volume systems, just use
new Date().getTime();
You can also look for GUID generators, which produce something unique, but rather bigger than an int.
My suggestion is to have an Object Pooling for ID generation. When the entity is "deleted", the ID should be returned to the pool, and when needing a new ID, the pool should either
Give you a new ID (if old ID doesn't exists in pool) or
Create a new ID for an entity.
The problem is that you will have to create an entity management system that caters for returning the "used" ID to the pool if entity is "deleted" (bear in mind the multithreading environment, which you will need to manage).
Alternatively, use a database system which provides primary key generation (most uses AUTO_INCREMENT).

Automatically apply field conversion function in Hibernate

I have a database table with a field that I need to read from and write to via Hibernate. It is string field, but the contents are encrypted. And for various reasons (e.g. a need to sort the plain text values), the encrypt/decrypt functions are implemented inside the database, not in Java.
The problem I'm struggling with now is finding a way to invoke the encrypt/decrypt functions in Hibernate-generated SQL everywhere that the field is referenced and in a way that's transparent to my application code. Is this possible? I've looked into Hibernate's support for "derived" properties, but unfortunately, that approach doesn't support read-write fields. Any ideas appreciated.
I don't think there's a way to make encryption like you've described it completely transparent to your application. The closest thing you can get is to make it transparent outside of entity. In your entity class:
#Entity
#SQLInsert(sql="INSERT INTO my_table(my_column, id) VALUES(encrypt(?),?)")
#SQLUpdate( sql="UPDATE my_table SET my_column = encrypt(?) WHERE id = ?")
public class MyEntity {
private String myValue;
....
#Formula("decrypt(my_column)")
public String getValue() {
return myValue;
}
public void setValue(String value) {
myValue = value;
}
#Column (name="my_column")
private String getValueCopy() {
return myValue;
}
private void setValueCopy(String value) {
}
}
value is mapped as derived property, you should be able to use it in queries.
valueCopy is private and is used to get around derived property being read-only.
SQLInsert and SQLUpdate is black voodoo magic to force encryption on insert / update. Note that parameter order IS important, you need to find out what order Hibernate would generate parameters in without using custom insert / update and then replicate it.
You could have a trigger internal to the database that, on retrieval, decrypts the value and replaces the returned result and on insert encrypts the value and replaces the stored result with the encrypted value. You could also do this with a view wrapper - i.e. have an insert trigger on the view, and have the view automatically decrypt the value.
To better explain: have a view that decrypts the value, and an on insert trigger that encrypts the value that is linked to the view.
Actually, in the end, I went a different route and submitted a patch to Hibernate. It was committed to trunk last week and so I think it will be in the next release following 3.5. Now, in property mappings, you can specify SQL "read" and "write" expressions to call SQL functions or perform some other kind of database-side conversion.
Assuming you have access to the encrypt/decrypt algorithm from within Java, I would set up my mapped class something like
public class encryptedTable {
#Column(name="encrypted_field")
private String encryptedValue;
#Transient
private String value;
public String getEncryptedValue() {
return encryptedValue;
}
public String getValue() {
return value;
}
public void setEncryptedValue(String encryptedValue) {
this.encryptedValue = encryptedValue;
this.value = decrypt(encryptedValue);
}
public void setValue(String value) {
this.value = value;
this.encryptedValue = encrypt(value);
}
}
And then use get/set Value as the accessor within your program and leave the get/set EncryptedValue for Hibernates use when accessing the database.
Why not just use the SQl server encryption that seems to already be in place by calling a stored proc in Hibernate instead of letting Hibernate generate a query?

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