[dali-dev] Dali comments regarding generated artifacts/wizards

[Tom Mutdosch <tommut@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I've been using Dali for a while and I think it is very nice.  I have a 
few questions that I thought someone might be able to answer or comment 
on as I'm looking to write some tooling around generated entities.  Keep 
in mind that I'm currently using Dali 0.5 since the 2.0 milestones did 
not yet have the ability to add persistence to the project.  So if some 
of these things have already been added to the latest codebase (and I'm 
sure many have), I apologize in advance.  :)

*  The Add Persistence dialog
1) Schemas - Setting the schema here currently does not seem to have a 
lot of impact.  It looks like it is used primarily as the default for 
when later generating entities, and for validating the generated 
entities.  Generating entities from multiple schemas or connections does 
not seem to be supported here.  Could there be an option for the 
selected schema to be written out to the orm.xml as the default schema 
for that persistence unit? 
  <persistence-unit-defaults>
          <schema>ADMINISTRATOR</schema>
   </persistence-unit-defaults>
This is a requirement when using DB2 for instance, and it might be nice 
to be able to assist the user here. 

2) Multiple persistence units.  Could the Add Persistence be used more 
as a Add Persistence Unit dialog that could be launched at any time?  
This way, a user could add multiple persistence units to handle entities 
that from multiple connections or schemas.  And as mentioned above, it 
might be nice to be able to specify that for a particular persistence 
unit, you want the schema name generated into a mappings.xml file (and 
reference that from the persistence.xml) or instead that you want your 
entities generated with a schema tag on the @table annotation.

3) Connection info.  Since the connection information is collected here, 
it might be nice if the connection info could be generated into the 
persistence.xml for the user.  Perhaps you could be prompted to specify 
a datasource name, or to instead have the connection information 
generated directly into the persistence.xml (for non-datasource, 
driver-managed connections). 

4)  Persistence providers.  Could the persistence provider be made a 
dropdown with a list of common persistence providers (and perhaps made 
to be able to programatically add new providers)?  This would make it 
much easier to select a provider and have it generated into your 
persistence.xml. 



* The Generate Entities dialog
1) Schema/Connection.   It might make sense to be able to select the 
Connection and Schema at this time as well.  It could of course default 
to the connection/schema initially selected, but  seems restrictive to 
only allow show entities from the originally chosen connection/schema.  
Or perhaps you could select which existing persistence unit you want to 
generate entities from.



* Entity generation customization.
It is easy enough to tailor your entities after they have been generated 
using the annotation property pages, but I think that there could still 
be some useful options that can be set up front in the wizard.
1) Columns.  It could be helpful to see the Database columns from the 
table you have selected.  Perhaps you do not want fields/accessors 
generated for all columns (as your application does not require them). 

2) Primary Key. It might be nice to be able to specify a column to use 
for a primary key in the case where one is not explicitly specified in 
the database table.  Or to be able to choose multiple columns for a 
compound key.  Also, you could select the column to be used for Auto Key 
Generation.

3) Optimistic Concurrency.  You could select a concurrency column 
(generated with an @version annotation).

4) Relationships.  It would be nice to see relationships for a selected 
table, as well as the ability to add additional relationships to other 
tables (that are specified in the database via foreign keys)

5)  Additional constructors.  In addition to the default constructors, 
it might be nice to be able to generate a constructor that takes in the 
primary key values since they always need set anyway.  Or constructor 
that takes in all values for required non-null values.


And that's about it!  :)  If some of these things have already been 
implemented or are in the plans (or there are no plans), please let me 
know.  Or if the right way to do something is to handle it myself 
programatically (by extending EntityGenerators, etc) that would be 
appreciated too. 
Thanks for any information that can be provided.
Tom