1. DataNucleus Object Store

The DataNucleus Object Store enables domain objects to be persisted to relational as well as NoSQL databases. The object store is implemented using DataNucleus.

This user guide discuss end-user features, configuration and customization of the DataNucleus object store.

DataNucleus as a product also supports the JPA API; Apache Isis is likely to also support JPA in the future.

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Apache Isis documentation is broken out into a number of user and reference guides.

The user guides available are:

The reference guides are:

The remaining guides are:

  • Developers' Guide (how to set up a development environment for Apache Isis and contribute back to the project)

  • Committers' Guide (release procedures and related practices)

2. Configuring DataNucleus

Apache Isis programmatically configures DataNucleus; any Apache Isis properties with the prefix isis.persistor.datanucleus.impl are passed through directly to the JDO/DataNucleus objectstore (with the prefix stripped off, of course).

DataNucleus will for itself also and read the META-INF/persistence.xml; at a minimum this defines the name of the "persistence unit". n theory it could also hold mappings, though in Apache Isis we tend to use annotations instead.

Furthermore, DataNucleus will search for various other XML mapping files, eg mappings.jdo. A full list can be found here. The metadata in these XML can be used to override the annotations of annotated entities; see Overriding JDO Annotatons for further discussion.

2.1. Configuration Properties

These configuration properties are typically stored in WEB-INF/persistor_datanucleus.properties. However, you can place all configuration properties into WEB-INF/isis.properties if you wish (the configuration properties from all config files are merged together).

2.1.1. Configuration Properties for Apache Isis itself

Table 1. JDO/DataNucleus Objectstore Configuration Properties
Property Value
(default value)
Description

isis.persistor.
datanucleus.
classMetadataLoadedListener

FQCN

The default (o.a.i.os.jdo.dn.CreateSchemaObjectFromClassMetadata) creates a DB schema object

isis.persistor.datanucleus.
RegisterEntities.packagePrefix

fully qualified package names (CSV)

that specifies the entities early rather than allow DataNucleus to find the entities lazily. Further discussion below.

This property is IGNORED if the isis.appManifest configuration property is specified, or if an AppManifest is provided programmatically.

isis.persistor.datanucleus.
PublishingService.serializedForm

zipped

2.1.2. Configuration Properties passed through directly to DataNucleus.

Table 2. JDO/DataNucleus Objectstore Configuration Properties
Property Value
(default value)
Description

isis.persistor.datanucleus.impl.*

Passed through directly to Datanucleus (with isis.persistor.datanucleus.impl prefix stripped)

isis.persistor.datanucleus.impl.
datanucleus.persistenceByReachabilityAtCommit

false

We recommend this setting is disabled.
Further discussion below.

2.2. persistence.xml

TODO

2.3. Eagerly Registering Entities

Both Apache Isis and DataNucleus have their own metamodels of the domain entities. Apache Isis builds its metamodel by walking the graph of types of the domain services. The JDO/DataNucleus objectstore then takes these types and registers them with DataNucleus.

In some cases, though, not every entity type is discoverable from the API of the service actions. This is especially the case if you have lots of subtypes (where the action method specifies only the supertype). In such cases the Isis and JDO metamodels is built lazily, when an instance of that (sub)type is first encountered.

Apache Isis is quite happy for the metamodel to be lazily created, and - to be fair - DataNucleus also works well in most cases. In some cases, though, we have found that the JDBC driver (eg HSQLDB) will deadlock if DataNucleus tries to submit some DDL (for a lazily discovered type) intermingled with DML (for updating). In any case, it’s probably not good practice to have DataNucleus work this way.

The framework thus provide mechanisms to search for all @PersistenceCapable entities under specified package(s), and registers them all eagerly. In fact there are two:

  • as of 1.9.0 the recommended (and simpler) approach is to specify an AppManifest, either as a isis.appManifest configuration property or programmatically.

  • for earlier versions the isis.persistor.datanucleus.RegisterEntities.packagePrefix configuration property can be specified. To bootstrap as a webapp this is usually specified in persistor_datanucleus.properties. (This is also supported in 1.9.0 if no AppManifest is specified. For integration testing this can be specified programatically.

Further discussion on specifying the package(s) in integration testing (for either approach) can be found in the user guide.

2.4. Persistence by Reachability

By default, JDO/DataNucleus supports the concept of persistence-by-reachability. That is, if a non-persistent entity is associated with an already-persistent entity, then DataNucleus will detect this and will automatically persist the associated object. Put another way: there is no need to call Apache Isis' DomainObjectContainer#persist(.) or DomainObjectContainer#persistIfNotAlready(.) methods.

However, convenient though this feature is, you may find that it causes performance issues.

DataNucleus' persistence-by-reachability may cause performance issues. We strongly recommend that you disable it.

One scenario in particular where this performance issues can arise is if your entities implement the java.lang.Comparable interface, and you have used Apache Isis' ObjectContracts utility class. The issue here is that ObjectContracts implementation can cause DataNucleus to recursively rehydrate a larger number of associated entities. (More detail below).

We therefore recommend that you disable persistence-by-reachability by adding the following to persistor_datanucleus.properties:

isis.persistor.datanucleus.impl.datanucleus.persistenceByReachabilityAtCommit=false

This change has been made to the SimpleApp archetype

If you do disable this feature, then you will (of course) need to ensure that you explicitly persist all entities using the DomainObjectContainer#persist(.) or DomainObjectContainer#persistIfNotAlready(.) methods.

2.4.1. The issue in more detail

Consider these entities (yuml.me/b8681268):

party agreementrole agreement

In the course of a transaction, the Agreement entity is loaded into memory (not necessarily modified), and then new AgreementRoles are associated to it.

All these entities implement Comparable using ObjectContracts, and the implementation of AgreementRole's (simplified) is:

public class AgreementRole {
    ...
    public int compareTo(AgreementRole other) {
        return ObjectContracts.compareTo(this, other, "agreement","startDate","party");
    }
}

while Agreement's is implemented as:

public class Agreement {
    ...
    public int compareTo(Agreement other) {
        return ObjectContracts.compareTo(this, other, "reference");
    }
}

and Party's is similarly implemented as:

public class Party {
    ...
    public int compareTo(Party other) {
        return ObjectContracts.compareTo(this, other, "reference");
    }
}

DataNucleus’s persistence-by-reachability algorithm adds the AgreementRole instances into a SortedSet, which causes AgreementRole#compareTo() to fire:

  • the evaluation of the "agreement" property delegates back to the Agreement, whose own Agreement#compareTo() uses the scalar reference property. As the Agreement is already in-memory, this does not trigger any further database queries

  • the evaluation of the "startDate" property is just a scalar property of the AgreementRole, so will already in-memory

  • the evaluation of the "party" property delegates back to the Party, whose own Party#compareTo() requires the uses the scalar reference property. However, since the Party is not yet in-memory, using the reference property triggers a database query to "rehydrate" the Party instance.

In other words, in figuring out whether AgreementRole requires the persistence-by-reachability algorithm to run, it causes the adjacent associated entity Party to also be retrieved.

2.5. Using JNDI DataSource

Isis' JDO objectstore can be configured either to connect to the database using its own connection pool, or by using a container-managed datasource.

2.5.1. Application managed

Using a connection pool managed directly by the application (that is, by Apache Isis' JDO objectstore and ultimately by DataNucleus) requires a single set of configuration properties to be specified.

In either WEB-INF\isis.properties file (or WEB-INF\persistor.properties, or WEB-INF\persistor_datanucleus.properties), specify the connection driver, url, username and password.

For example:

isis.persistor.datanucleus.impl.javax.jdo.option.ConnectionDriverName=net.sf.log4jdbc.DriverSpy
isis.persistor.datanucleus.impl.javax.jdo.option.ConnectionURL=jdbc:log4jdbc:hsqldb:mem:test
isis.persistor.datanucleus.impl.javax.jdo.option.ConnectionUserName=sa
isis.persistor.datanucleus.impl.javax.jdo.option.ConnectionPassword=

Those configuration properties that start with the prefix isis.persistor.datanucleus.impl. are passed through directly to DataNucleus (with the prefix removed).

It is also possible to specify the ` datanucleus.ConnectionPasswordDecrypter ` property; see the DataNucleus documentation for further details.

2.5.2. Container managed (JNDI)

Using a datasource managed by the servlet container requires three separate bits of configuration.

Firstly, specify the name of the datasource in the WEB-INF\persistor_datanucleus.properties file. For example:

If connection pool settings are also present in this file, they will simply be ignored. Any other configuration properties that start with the prefix isis.persistor.datanucleus.impl. are passed through directly to DataNucleus (with the prefix removed).

Secondly, in the WEB-INF/web.xml, declare the resource reference:

<resource-ref>
    <description>db</description>
    <res-ref-name>jdbc/simpleapp</res-ref-name>
    <res-type>javax.sql.DataSource</res-type>
    <res-auth>Container</res-auth>
</resource-ref>

Finally, declare the datasource as required by the servlet container. For example, if using Tomcat 7, the datasource can be specified by adding the following to $TOMCAT_HOME/conf/context.xml:

<Resource name="jdbc/simpleapp"
  auth="Container"
  type="javax.sql.DataSource"
  maxActive="100"
  maxIdle="30"
  maxWait="10000"
  username="sa"
  password="p4ssword"
  driverClassName="com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver"
  url="jdbc:sqlserver://127.0.0.1:1433;instance=.;databaseName=simpleapp"/>

You will also need to make sure that the JDBC driver is on the servlet container’s classpath. For Tomcat, this means copying the driver to $TOMCAT_HOME/lib.

According to Tomcat’s documentation, it is supposedly possible to copy the conf/context.xml to the name of the webapp, eg conf/mywebapp.xml, and scope the connection to that webapp only. I was unable to get this working, however.

3. Overriding JDO Annotations

The JDO Objectstore (or rather, the underlying DataNucleus implementation) builds its own persistence metamodel by reading both annotations on the class and also by searching for metadata in XML files. The metadata in the XML files takes precedence over the annotations, and so can be used to override metadata that is "hard-coded" in annotations.

For example, as of 1.9.0 the various Isis addons modules (not ASF) use schemas for each entity. For example, the AuditEntry entity in the audit module is annotated as:

@javax.jdo.annotations.PersistenceCapable(
        identityType=IdentityType.DATASTORE,
        schema = "IsisAddonsAudit",
        table="AuditEntry")
public class AuditEntry {
    ...
}

This will map the AuditEntry class to a table "IsisAddonsAudit"."AuditEntry"; that is using a custom schema to own the object.

Suppose though that for whatever reason we didn’t want to use a custom schema but would rather use the default. We can override the above annotation using a package.jdo file, for example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<jdo xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/jdo/jdo"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/jdo/jdo http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/jdo/jdo_3_0.xsd" version="3.0">
    <package name="org.isisaddons.module.audit.dom">
        <class name="AuditEntry" schema="PUBLIC" table="IsisAddonsAuditEntry">
        </class>
    </package>
</jdo>

This file should be placed can be placed in src/main/java/META-INF within your application’s dom module.

You can use a mixin action on Persistable mixin to download the JDO class metadata in XML form.

  • The same approach should work for any other JDO metadata, but some experimentation might be required.+

    For example, in writing up the above example we found that writing schema="" (in an attempt to say, "use the default schema for this table") actually caused the original annotation value to be used instead.

  • Forcing the schema to "PUBLIC" (as in the above example) works, but it isn’t ideal because the name "PUBLIC" is not vendor-neutral (it works for HSQLDB, but MS SQL Server uses "dbo" as its default).

  • As of 1.9.0 Apache Isis will automatically (attempt) to create the owning schema for a given table if it does not exist. This behaviour can be customized, as described in the section on using modules.

  • You may need to override the entire class metadata rather than individual elements; the mixin mentioned above can help here.

4. Java8

DataNucleus 4.x supports Java 7, but can also be used with Java 8, eg for streams support against collections managed by DataNucleus.

Just include within <dependencies> of your dom module’s pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.datanucleus</groupId>
    <artifactId>datanucleus-java8</artifactId>
    <version>4.2.0-release</version>t
</dependency>

The DataNucleus website includes a page listing version compatibility of these extensions vis-a-vis the core DataNucleus platform.


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