Auto populate POJO.. Is there a library that can do this?

[muthu.ramadoss]

Folks,

Anyone know of any libraries that can autopopulate a pojo?

Ex:

I have a User object with first name and last name as members. I would
want to auto populate the object with some random values so the user
object can be used right away.

User user = new User ();

// Explicit member assignment
user.setFirstName ("John");
user.setLastName ("Doe");

// I need this

AutoPopulateLibrary.fill (user);

OR

user = AutoPopulateLibrary.fill (User.class);

I'll pass the user object or the class name or whatever and the target
object must be magically filled.

Can this be done already, or Am i missing something here?

Please comment.

 

[Harry Bosch]

Well... Populating with random data, not that I know of. That would be
easy to implement with simple bean introspection.

There are classes with the jakarta commons beanutils for handling
populating beans. but you need to provide values via a properties
object.

Go to: http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/beanutils/
and check out the API docs or click here:
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/beanutils/commons-beanutils-1.7.0/docs/api/
Check out the BeanUtils, and the PropertyUtils classes.

 

[Chris Smith]

User user = new User ();

// Explicit member assignment
user.setFirstName ("John");
user.setLastName ("Doe");

// I need this

AutoPopulateLibrary.fill (user);

And where do you expect to get the data ("John" and "Doe") from?

The term "POJO" is often used with O/R mapping; is the data in a
relational database? If so, you'll have to pass in some kind of key or
other information to identify the object you want; otherwise the data
can't be found. Products to do this kind of work include Hibernate,
EJB-CMP, Oracle TopLink, several JDO vendors, and dozens more. Off-hand
and without knowing your specific needs, I'd start by looking into
Hibernate.

If the data is elsewhere besides a database, please let us know where
it's supposed to come from. Otherwise, you really DO want magic, and
computer programs don't excel at ESP.

--
www.designacourse.com
The Easiest Way To Train Anyone... Anywhere.

Chris Smith - Lead Software Developer/Technical Trainer
MindIQ Corporation

 

[muthu.ramadoss]

Yes I have looked into the Jakarta commons BeanUtil class. As you
rightly said it would require properties to be manually fed.

What I need is the pojo to be auto filled. This can be used for OR map
testing with hibernate etc.,

The entire use case i am describing fits more on the testing side than
on the development scenario.

In short the test use case would be:

Instantiate objects and fill data automatically.
save in database (so OR mapping can be tested)
remove them.

 

[muthu.ramadoss]

No I really dont care about the data.. The data can be anything.. thats
why it can be auto filled.

As I replied above, this is more of an test use case which would test
the hibernate OR mapping.

This seems to be a nice little utility to write and I think would also
benefit the community as well.

What do you think? Is this my chance to write this utility and shoot
into the Java limelight

 

[Roedy Green]

No I really dont care about the data.. The data can be anything.. thats
why it can be auto filled.

If you don't have it as a bean, then you have to use reflection. Find
the fields, and depending on field type use the corresponding number
generator. For references you are hosed.

 

[muthu.ramadoss]

For references, can we not recursively walk through the reference and
autofill?

Do any of you feel this would be a nice little utility that can come in
handy for filling up 100's of objects for a variety of test cases?

 

[Harry Bosch]

I found something else for you...

http://jmock.codehaus.org/

 

[muthu.ramadoss]

Harry,

As we discussed earlier, Mocks would not auto populate the POJO.

http://groups.google.com/group/EtoE