Hibernate Generic D.A.O. Framework

NOTICE:

Fellow developers,

As of Dec 2011, I am not currently supporting this project. I have been the sole owner of this project from the beginning, but I will no longer be following up on issues or making releases. At this point there is no one else to take over this responsibility, so it will not be happening. There are still some users who respond on the Google group. I apologize for the inconvenience.

If anyone would like to become a contributor and take charge of patches and releases, contact me and I can work with you on it. My contact info can be found here.

It is possible that I will return to the project at some time, but at this point it's just not a technology stack that I am working with.

The motivation behind the framework

We had worked on a project where we hand-coded all of our DAOs. This produced four irksome difficulties: (1) Method names and implementations were not altogether consistent. (2) It was a pain to make additional columns sortable or filterable, and as a result, a lot of pages lacked good sorting and filtering. (3) Making additional DAOs was tedious and took a fair amount of time. (4) Writing tests for DAOs is tricky and tedious, so no one really did.

This framework aims to ease our troubles.

Why might you consider looking into this framework?

Generic DAO: With the sweetness of Java generics, the concept of generic DAOs is not new, and it’s not difficult. However, we’ve put a lot of work into making these easy to use and robust. So if you like the way we’ve done it, then this framework provides ready-made code for you. On the other hand if you’d rather make your own, then simply feel free to look at our source code for ideas and help on a few potentially tricky issues.

Search: Search is the most original and sophisticated part of this framework, and it can be used with or without the generic DAO portion of the framework. The search capability is designed around the use-case of a list page with sorting, filtering, column selection and paging. However, its use is certainly not limited to that. The value that the search adds is simpler, more robust querying with less coding and less testing. It is similar to Hibernate Criteria, but it is simpler to use and can easily move across layers of an application including view and even remote layers. Plus is works with both Hibernate and JPA^*.

Remote DAO (for R.I.A.s?): If you you’re like us, you don’t want to write and configure an individual DAO style remote service for each entity in a R.I.A. or other client-heavy application. This framework may have the solution. We provide utilities and sample code to adapt our single general DAO to any remoting technology interface. Just configure this single remote access point and the client can do any basic CRUD or search operation on any entity. Again, if you don’t like our way of doing things, maybe you can at least get some ideas from our source code.

Remote Search (for R.I.A.s?): As mentioned above, the framework can provide a single point for client-server CRUD and search operations. The framework’s search is meant to be able to cross the client-server boundary. So lists and searches in the client application can take advantage of the same easy-to-use features and consistency that the search functionality provides in the server tier or single tier application. This consistency allowed us to create a reusable collection type in Adobe Flex 3 that is associated with a single search object and automatically updates itself from the server according to the search parameters.^**

^*A fairly simple adapter is required for each JPA provider. Right now we only have an adapter for Hibernate Entity Manager. If anyone would like to contribute an adapter for any other JPA provider (OpenJPA, TopLink, etc.), that would be great.

^**If time permits, we would like to eventually post our corresponding Adobe Flex 3 framework and utilities.

More Information

Wiki Documentation: UserGuide

Javadoc: http://hibernate-generic-dao.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/docs/api/index.html

Blog: http://hibernategenericdao.wordpress.com/

Questions and Comments

Please post at http://groups.google.com/group/java-generic-dao.

Code Examples

Creating DAOs for individual model classes:

Simply extend the GenericDAO class with the specific type.

public interface ProjectDAO extends GenericDAO<Project, Long> {

}

public class ProjectDAOImpl extends GenericDAOImpl<Project, Long> implements ProjectDAO {

}

The following methods (and several more) are now available on ProjectDAO

Project project = projectDAO.find(projectId);

List<Project> list = projectDAO.findAll();

projectDAO.save(project);

projectDAO.remove(project);

projectDAO.removeById(project.getId());


Search search = new Search();
search.addFilterEqual("name", "hibernate-generic-dao");

List<Project> list = projectDAO.search(search);

int count = projectDAO.count(search);

SearchResult<Project> result = projectDAO.searchAndCount(search);
list = result.getResult();
count = result.getTotalCount();

search.clear();
search.addField("rating", Field.OP_AVG);
int avgProjectRating = (Integer) prjoectDAO.searchUnique(search);

A GeneralDAO is also provided with DAO methods for any entity:

public interface GeneralDAO {

	public <T> T find(Class<T> type, Serializable id);

	public <T> T[] find(Class<T> type, Serializable... ids);

	public <T> T getReference(Class<T> type, Serializable id);

	public <T> T[] getReferences(Class<T> type, Serializable... ids);

	public boolean save(Object entity);

	public boolean[] save(Object... entities);

	public boolean remove(Object entity);

	public void remove(Object... entities);

	public boolean removeById(Class<?> type, Serializable id);

	public void removeByIds(Class<?> type, Serializable... ids);

	public <T> List<T> findAll(Class<T> type);

	public List search(ISearch search);

	public Object searchUnique(ISearch search);

	public int count(ISearch search);

	public SearchResult searchAndCount(ISearch search);

	public boolean isAttached(Object entity);

	public void refresh(Object... entities);

	public void flush();

	public Filter getFilterFromExample(Object example);

	public Filter getFilterFromExample(Object example, ExampleOptions options);
}

Search DTO usage examples

Search search = new Search(Project.class);

//filtering
search.addFilterEqual("name", "hibernate-generic-dao");

search.addFilterLessThan("completionDate", new Date());

search.addFilterOr(
    Filter.equal("name", "Jack"),
    Filter.and(
        Filter.equal("name", "Jill"),
        Filter.like("location", "%Chicago%"),
        Filter.greaterThan("age", 5)
    )
);

search.addFilterIn("name", "Jack", "Jill", "Bob");

search.addFilterNot(Filter.in("name","Jack", "Jill", "Bob"));

//sorting
search.addSort("name");
search.addSort("age", true); //descending

//projection
search.addField("name");
search.addField("location");

//or with column operators
search.addField("rating", Field.OP_AVG);
search.addField("developerCount", Field.OP_MAX);

//paging
search.setMaxResults(15); //a.k.a. results per page
search.setPage(3);

//controlling eager fetching of relationships
serach.addFetch("owner");

Nested properties are also fully supported...

search.addFilterEqual("status.name", "active");
search.addFilterGreaterThan("workgroup.manager.salary", 75000.00);

search.addSort("status.name");