What is the easiest way to persist an object containing a org.dom4j.Document as a field? What I have been doing so far is writing a table for every class I want to persist, but they were all classes I created.

To make it concrete, suppose I want to persist the following:



The class entry in my mapping file would be something like the following:



What would the sql-type be? And do I also need a class element for the org.dom4j.Document class?

This is probably a really simple question, but I'm not seeing how to handle this. Thanks for any help.

Hi,

When the type of an attribute of an object is also an object, you have to map it like an association. So, you write a one-to-one association, a one-to-many or a many-to-many association, and it is the same for a class like org.dom4j.Document.

Don't forget you must have a mapping file for all the class you map, so you need one for the Document class.

Bye,

Charles

Depends on how you want to store it, if you just want to put all the XML into a varchar field, a custom UserType would be the easiest.

Thanks for the response. It isn't a string, so I don't think I can put it into a varchar field, unless you mean changing the doc field so it's a string instead of a Document. That is not a good solution though, because I don't want to deal with strings but with Document objects.

hi Charles,

Thanks for the response. What I don't understand though is that if it is necessary for me to write a mapping for the org.dom4j.Document class, what would, for example, the id be? I don't quite understand how pre-written classes designed by somebody else would be mapped, since I don't have access to the internals, in general, and they won't necessarily have a field that I could use as the id.

Of course it is possible to persist the Document object into a string field - read the docs how UserTypes work. It all depends on how you want to store the XML in the database, probably you could tell us that?

Thanks. I will look into UserTypes. I don't care how the XML is stored. I just want to persist an object that has a Document as a field, and be able to get back an object from the database such that when I call getDoc(), it returns an equivalent Document object. The quickest, easiest route to that end is what I want, which looks like a UserType at this point, but there are no other constraints, so if there is an easier way...