[Middlegen-user] A few suggestions, a potential bug...

[Dean Des Rosiers]

I am new to Middlegen and I really enjoy using it and looking at the code.  It suits our organization’s way of working.  I look forward to its continued improvement.   I address these suggestions to the user list as opposed to the “suggested features” page since I’m such a new user and may be ignorant of the presence of certain features.   First I’d like to be able to include a table for viewing in the GUI, but not generated.  This would be perfect for “M:N join tables.”  I have such a table in my project now which I need to manually (in ant, anyway) delete after it’s generated.  The presence of an Entity bean for this table makes my MVCSoft Persistence Manager (CMP 2.0 engine) very unhappy.  This feature could be accessed from within the table element of the middlegen task:  <table name=”EntityRole” generate=”false”>  Naturally, the default would be “true.”  You could also access it from the “table panel” in the GUI via a checkbox.   Next, I’d like to know if it would be OK to allow the user to pick java.util.Date in lieu of a java.sql class in the “Java type combo” in the “property panel”.  I’d like to take advantage of the fact that CMP insulates me from the java.sql package.  I’ll be using java.util.Date in my front end and DTOs, why not drive it through to the Entity bean?  Is there something I’m missing here?  Have I been doing it wrong?!   Currently the preferences.xml file contains a lot of good information.  I was actually dragging and pointing and clicking on all my tables every time I tested my template (I’m working on an MVC-centric CMP 20 template).  If the users and developers feel it’s appropriate, it may be nice to save the x and y values of the upper left corner of each of those tables in the preferences file as well.  It would be a real time saver for those of us with a lot of related tables.   Speaking of the preferences file, I have an Entity for which I need to assign the primary key property’s Java Type to “long” (MVC needs it this way).  This is reflected in the preferences file, but when I ran the middlegen GUI again, the property’s type was back to java.lang.Integer.  Might be a bug, there.   Sorry about the long message, but I’ve accrued a lot of comments in the last four days.  Back to work!   Dean Des Rosiers