The development team thinks that the <dynabean/> tag is just bloat and is not happy with the hard dependency of Hibernate upon commons-beanutils. We'd love to be able to remove this feature, but we need to see how disruptive this would be. You would still be able to use dynabeans by writing your own CompositeUserTypes.

My distaste for Dynabeans stems from limitations their use imposes for Struts development that may not be true with the Hibernate implementation. Dynabeans also cause a disproportionate number of errors.

I think It is better to use Map for this feature.

Yes, Juozas, I think you're right. When I originally implemented this stuff, I considered doing it for a Map instead of a DynaBean, but at the time people were asking for DynaBeans....

We can easily change the current code to work only for Maps.

+1 for just doing this for Map...

...and i'll suggest we put an example implementation of a DynaBeanCompositeUserType on the wiki...good as an example of UserType's and good for any one who might depend on this dynabean stuff and want another solution ;)

+1. I Agree with Max. The wiki should present an approach that will satisfy users who maybe using dyna-beans.

I don't personally use DynaBeans so it won't affect me much either way, but, how about putting the code you want to "remove" into an optional package so the core is not dependent on bean-utils but people who do want that functionality don't have to go to the wiki to try and find/figure out how to write it again for themselves? (not that I wouldn't love to see some more/better examples on the wiki...)

To be quite honest, what I want is a way out of getters and setters. I want a generic get and generic set that takes a parameters that get me to the place I want.

Compile errors? Heck, I can write something make me a file full of static final string declarations based upon what's in the database.

I "grew up" in an environment like this. I want to get it back.

I'm just starting out, so if I can do it without Dynabeans sure, axe them.

Give me a pointer and their guillotine fodder.

-Joe

Well, as Juozas points out - everything you can do with a DynaBean, you can do with a Map.

Even the Struts KickStart book that talks a decent length about DynaBeans just uses them in ActionForms. They don't seem to get used outside of the "V" in the MVC.

I get the distinct feeling that, as designed, they never considered anyone would think about trying to persist them.

I'm kinda curious to hear what James Turner thinks, but I suspect that persisting DynaBeans isn't going to be all that useful to you unless your UI closely follow your object model i.e. each screen manipulates one object (uh huh...uh huh).

I would have to assume (I havent gotten that far yet) that this also implies that DynaBeans make it easy to get the data out of them and into something (anything!) else.

I'll trust you guys to make it easy for me :-)

Well, at the time this feature was added, a LOT of people had requested it. But then it turned out that noone really used it.

Due to absolutely underwhelming interest in DynaBeans, they're gone, replaced by the <dynamic-component> element, which uses a Map. I expect that this is far more generally useful.

I have not used DynaBean/Dyna-Component etc.. But i have used a framework that allow for a single xml object that discribed the display and persistance.

You did not need to have Object per form, as you are add multiple xml objects per page. Another feature that i loved was that you could do grouping of attributes like "edit", "search", "label" etc. Using this framework allowed you to develop adminstrative screens at lightning speed as often all you have to do was map the Object to a table and then link the Object to a action like edit/search and you were in business.

Unfortunately the framework is propetory and written in non-java :( . Would we be able to do this kind of stuff with the Dyna-Component? Or is there something out there like this.

Have a look at OFBiz Entity Engine, it is more like this. Hibernate is not meant for this kind of app.

Thanks for the info, I would like to use something that can do both. So it can be used for RAD development and also allow for the creation of core business objects to be used from MQ and Webservices.

The project i am working on is going to replace a large legacy system written in 2E on top of a Db2 iSeries database. The table structive is massively complex and messy with over 700 tables. I was hoping to use Hibernate to map against this structure and create core business objects that could be called from the green screens and use some kind of RAD web development framework for the web frontend reusing these objects.


Could this Entity Engine run on top of Hibernate?

Thanks alot for you help mike

PS : I am writing a program to reverse engine 2E models into ERD daigrams and Hibernate mapping files