Glassfish and Automatic Table Generation (Java2db)

Pramod Gopinath's Weblog

Glassfish has the feature that would enable the user to automatically generate the database schema for out-of-container (javase) applications.

How to enable java2db for out-of-container case ?

For the EJB3. 0 application that would be run outside of the container ensure that the persistence.xml file has the toplink.ddl-generation property set to a value of "drop-and-create-tables" or "create-tables".

Property Name	Description
toplink.ddl-generation	Possible values of “create-tables"/"drop-and-create-tables"/"none". The default value is “none”.
toplink.create-ddl-jdbc-file-name	(Optional) Name of the create jdbc ddl file. The default value is "createDDL.jdbc".
toplink.drop-ddl-jdbc-file-name	(Optional) Name of the drop jdbc ddl file. The default value is "dropDDL.jdbc".
toplink.application-location	(Optional) The location where the ddl files have to be written out. The defaul value is "." i.e the current working directory

Below is an e.g of a persistence.xml for an out of container case running against the Derby database

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <persistence xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence"
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" >
        <persistence-unit name ="em" >
            <description>Basic javaSE application containing JSR 220 entity beans</description>
            <provider>oracle.toplink.essentials.ejb.cmp3.EntityManagerFactoryProvider</provider>
            <properties>
                    <!-- JDBC connection properties -->
                    <property name="toplink.jdbc.driver" value="org.apache.derby.jdbc.ClientDriver"/>
                    <property name="toplink.jdbc.url" value="jdbc:derby://localhost:1527/testdb;retrieveMessagesFromServerOnGetMessage=true;create=true;"/>
                    <property name="toplink.jdbc.user" value="APP"/>
                    <property name="toplink.jdbc.password" value="APP"/>

                    <!--java2db properties -->
                    <property name="toplink.ddl-generation" value="drop-and-create-tables"/>
            </properties>

             <class>entity.Customer</class>
             <class>entity.Item</class>
             <class>entity.Order</class>
        </persistence-unit>
    </persistence>

How to get the the jdbc ddl statements written out into files but not create/drop the tables in the database ?

There could be a use case where you would be interested to get the ddl statements associated with your application written out into the files but not do the actual drop/create of the entities in the database. In the javaSE environment when using Glassfish you can achieve this by ensuring that the toplink.ddl-generation feature is turned on in the persistence.xml file and additionally defining a java
system property "INTERACT_WITH_DB". If you define this java system property with the value of "false" then the tables would not be created in the database, but the ddl files would be written out. This feature is for the out-of-container case only.


Posted by pramodg ( Dec 19 2005, 04:30:18 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]

Internal Exception: com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.MySQLSyntaxErrorException: Unknown table 'PERSON'Error Code: 1051

<persistence xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence" version="1.0">
    <persistence-unit name="p">
        <class>ar.com.qrt2.entities.Person</class> 
        <properties>
            <property name="toplink.jdbc.driver" value="org.gjt.mm.mysql.Driver"/>
            <property name="toplink.jdbc.url" value="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/mydb"/>
            <property name="toplink.jdbc.user" value="mydb"/>
            <property name="toplink.jdbc.password" value="mydb"/>
            <property name="toplink.logging.level" value="INFO"/>
            
            <property name="toplink.ddl-generation" 
            		  value="drop-and-create-tables"/>
        </properties>
    </persistence-unit> 
</persistence>