While working on a library to persist the method calls and return values on a proxy object (for auto-generation of mock objects) I ran into an issue with using the Hibernate "class" property type that I'd like to get some feedback on and if possible, implement some new functionality to submit to the project.
While working on persisting the arguments to a method call I established that storing just the arguments themselves was not sufficient, I needed to also store their Class. I believe this was to accomodate the use of primtive data types (i.e. int vs Integer) in calls to the Java reflection API. I discovered that Java uses some class constants to represent primitive classes specifically for use in reflection. (i.e. int.class, float.class, etc)
These class objects return a flat name of "int" or "float", and calling Class.forName("int") is obviously not going to work.
When I attempted to store these primitive class objects as Hibernate's class type, I get a natural no such class exception.
The relevant portion of my hbm.xml looks like this:
Code:
<list name="argumentTypes" access="field" lazy="false">
<key column="argumentTypeId" />
<list-index column="sortOrder" />
<element type="class" />
</list>
The exception originates in org.hibernate.type.ClassType:
Code:
try {
return ReflectHelper.classForName(str);
}
catch (ClassNotFoundException cnfe) {
throw new HibernateException("Class not found: " + str);
}
And the ReflectHelper call looks like so:
Code:
try {
ClassLoader contextClassLoader = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader();
if (contextClassLoader!=null) {
return contextClassLoader.loadClass(name);
}
else {
return Class.forName(name);
}
}
catch (Exception e) {
return Class.forName(name);
}
I was wondering what others thought about whether or not this functionality is a good idea, if these classes should be considered impure and not supported, or if there's a glaring alternative I'm missing. If the consensus is for the first option I'll put together a patch and make a submission, if not I'll see if I can track down an alternate route.
Thanks.
Login
FAQ
Search