Cayenne Guide

CayenneModeler GUI tool is intended to work with object relational mapping projects. While you can edit your XML by hand, it is rarely needed, as the Modeler is a pretty advanced tool included in Cayenne distribution. To obtain CayenneModeler, download Cayenne distribution archive from https://cayenne.apache.org/download.html matching the OS you are using. Of course Java needs to be installed on the machine where you are going to run the Modeler.

The Modeler can also be started from Maven. While it may look like an exotic way to start a GUI application, it has its benefits - no need to download Cayenne distribution, the version of the Modeler always matches the version of the framework, the plugin can find mapping files in the project automatically. So it is an attractive option to some developers. Maven option requires a declaration in the POM:

And then can be run as

A Cayenne project is an XML representation of a model connecting database schema with Java classes. A project is normally created and manipulated via CayenneModeler GUI and then used to initialize Cayenne runtime. A project is made of one or more files. There’s always a root project descriptor file in any valid project. It is normally called cayenne-xyz.xml, where "xyz" is the name of the project.

Project descriptor can reference DataMap files, one per DataMap. DataMap files are normally called xyz.map.xml, where "xyz" is the name of the DataMap. For legacy reasons this naming convention is different from the convention for the root project descriptor above, and we may align it in the future versions. Here is how a typical project might look on the file system:

DataMap are referenced by name in the root descriptor:

Map files are resolved by Cayenne by appending ".map.xml" extension to the map name, and resolving the resulting string relative to the root descriptor URI. The following sections discuss varios ORM model objects, without regards to their XML representation. XML format details are really unimportant to the Cayenne users.

DataMap is a container of persistent entities and other object-relational metadata. DataMap provides developers with a scope to organize their entities, but it does not provide a namespace for entities. In fact all DataMaps present in runtime are combined in a single namespace. Each DataMap must be associated with a DataNode. This is how Cayenne knows which database to use when running a query.

DataNode is model of a database. It is actually pretty simple. It has an arbitrary user-provided name and information needed to create or locate a JDBC DataSource. Most projects only have one DataNode, though there may be any number of nodes if needed.

DbEntity is a model of a single DB table or view. DbEntity is made of DbAttributes that correspond to columns, and DbRelationships that map PK/FK pairs. DbRelationships are not strictly tied to FK constraints in DB, and should be mapped for all logical "relationships" between the tables.

ObjEntity is a model of a single persistent Java class. ObjEntity is made of ObjAttributes and ObjRelationships. Both correspond to entity class properties. However ObjAttributes represent "simple" properties (normally things like String, numbers, dates, etc.), while ObjRelationships correspond to properties that have a type of another entity.

ObjEntity maps to one or more DbEntities. There’s always one "root" DbEntity for each ObjEntity. ObjAttribiute maps to a DbAttribute or an Embeddable. Most often mapped DbAttribute is from the root DbEntity. Sometimes mapping is done to a DbAttribute from another DbEntity somehow related to the root DbEntity. Such ObjAttribute is called "flattened". Similarly ObjRelationship maps either to a single DbRelationship, or to a chain of DbRelationships ("flattened" ObjRelationship).

ObjEntities may also contain mapping of their lifecycle callback methods.

Embeddable is a model of a Java class that acts as a single attribute of an ObjEntity, but maps to multiple columns in the database.

A model of a stored procedure in the database.

A model of a query. Cayenne allows queries to be mapped in Cayenne project, or created in the code. Depending on the circumstances the users may take one or the other approach.

See chapter Reverse Engineering in Cayenne Modeler

With Cayenne Modeler you can create simple database schemas without any additional database tools. This is a good option for initial database setup if you completely created you model with the Modeler. You can start SQL schema generation by selecting menu Tools > Generate Database Schema

You can select what database parts should be generated and what tables you want

Before using Cayenne in you code you need to generate java source code for persistent objects. This can be done with Modeler GUI or via cgen maven/ant plugin.

To generate classes in the modeler use Tools > Generate Classes

There is three default types of code generation

Default type of generation suitable for almost all cases. Use this type unless you now what exactly you need to customize.

This type is for generating code for client part of a ROP setup.

In advanced mode you can control almost all aspects of code generation including custom templates for java code. See default Cayenne templates on GitHub as an example.

Normally each ObjEntity is mapped to a specific Java class (such as Artist or Painting) that explicitly declare all entity properties as pairs of getters and setters. However Cayenne allows to map a completly generic class to any number of entities. The only expectation is that a generic class implements org.apache.cayenne.DataObject. So an ideal candidate for a generic class is CayenneDataObject, or some custom subclass of CayenneDataObject.

If you don’t enter anything for Java Class of an ObjEntity, Cayenne assumes generic mapping and uses the following implicit rules to determine a class of a generic object. If DataMap "Custom Superclass" is set, runtime uses this class to instantiate new objects. If not, org.apache.cayenne.CayenneDataObject is used.

Class generation procedures (either done in the Modeler or with Ant or Maven) would skip entities that are mapped to CayenneDataObject explicitly or have no class mapping.

Cayenne supports three PK generation strategies:

Strategy should be set per each DbEntity independently.

To add Cayenne to your Maven project, include cayenne-server in your POM:

To add Cayenne to your Gradle project, include cayenne-server module:

If your environment requires manual dependency management (like Ant), check lib and lib/third-party folders of Cayenne distribution. It contains all Cayenne jars as well as the minimal set of third-party libraries to get you started.

In runtime Cayenne is accessed via org.apache.cayenne.configuration.server.ServerRuntime. ServerRuntime is created by calling a convenient builder:

The parameter you pass to the builder is a location of the main project file. Location is a '/'-separated path (same path separator is used on UNIX and Windows) that is resolved relative to the application classpath. The project file can be placed in the root package or in a subpackage (e.g. in the code above it is in "com/example" subpackage).

ServerRuntime encapsulates a single Cayenne stack. Most applications will just have one ServerRuntime using it to create as many ObjectContexts as needed, access the Dependency Injection (DI) container and work with other Cayenne features. Internally ServerRuntime is just a thin wrapper around the DI container. Detailed features of the container are discussed in Customizing Cayenne Runtime chapter. Here we’ll just show an example of how an application might turn on external transactions:

It is a good idea to shut down the runtime when it is no longer needed, usually before the application itself is shutdown:

When a runtime object has the same scope as the application, this may not be always necessary, however in some cases it is essential, and is generally considered a good practice. E.g. in a web container hot redeploy of a webapp will cause resource leaks and eventual OutOfMemoryError if the application fails to shutdown CayenneRuntime.

ServerRuntime requires at least one mapping project to run. But it can also take multiple projects and merge them together in a single configuration. This way different parts of a database can be mapped independently from each other (even by different software providers), and combined in runtime when assembling an application. Doing it is as easy as passing multiple project locations to ServerRuntime builder:

When the projects are merged, the following rules are applied:

Web applications can use a variety of mechanisms to configure and start the "services" they need, Cayenne being one of such services. Configuration can be done within standard Servlet specification objects like Servlets, Filters, or ServletContextListeners, or can use Spring, JEE CDI, etc. This is a user’s architectural choice and Cayenne is agnostic to it and will happily work in any environment. As described above, all that is needed is to create an instance of ServerRuntime somewhere and provide the application code with means to access it. And shut it down when the application ends to avoid container leaks.

Still Cayenne includes a piece of web app configuration code that can assist in quickly setting up simple Cayenne-enabled web applications. We are talking about CayenneFilter. It is declared in web.xml:

When started by the web container, it creates a instance of ServerRuntime and stores it in the ServletContext. Note that the name of Cayenne XML project file is derived from the "filter-name". In the example above CayenneFilter will look for an XML file "cayenne-project.xml". This can be overridden with "configuration-location" init parameter.

When the application runs, all HTTP requests matching the filter url-pattern will have access to a session-scoped ObjectContext like this:

Of course the ObjectContext scope, and other behavior of the Cayenne runtime can be customized via dependency injection. For this another filter init parameter called "extra-modules" is used. "extra-modules" is a comma or space-separated list of class names, with each class implementing Module interface. These optional custom modules are loaded after the the standard ones, which allows users to override all standard definitions.

For those interested in the DI container contents of the runtime created by CayenneFilter, it is the same ServerRuntime as would’ve been created by other means, but with an extra org.apache.cayenne.configuration.web.WebModule module that provides org.apache.cayenne.configuration.web.RequestHandler service. This is the service to override in the custom modules if you need to provide a different ObjectContext scope, etc.

ObjectContext is an interface that users normally work with to access the database. It provides the API to execute database operations and to manage persistent objects. A context is obtained from the ServerRuntime:

The call above creates a new instance of ObjectContext that can access the database via this runtime. ObjectContext is a single "work area" in Cayenne, storing persistent objects. ObjectContext guarantees that for each database row with a unique ID it will contain at most one instance of an object, thus ensuring object graph consistency between multiple selects (a feature called "uniquing"). At the same time different ObjectContexts will have independent copies of objects for each unique database row. This allows users to isolate object changes from one another by using separate ObjectContexts.

These properties directly affect the strategies for scoping and sharing (or not sharing) ObjectContexts. Contexts that are only used to fetch objects from the database and whose objects are never modified by the application can be shared between mutliple users (and multiple threads). Contexts that store modified objects should be accessed only by a single user (e.g. a web application user might reuse a context instance between multiple web requests in the same HttpSession, thus carrying uncommitted changes to objects from request to request, until he decides to commit or rollback them). Even for a single user it might make sense to use mutliple ObjectContexts (e.g. request-scoped contexts to allow concurrent requests from the browser that change and commit objects independently).

ObjectContext is serializable and does not permanently hold to any of the application resources. So it does not have to be closed. If the context is not used anymore, it should simply be allowed to go out of scope and get garbage collected, just like any other Java object.

Cayenne can persist Java objects that implement org.apache.cayenne.Persistent interface. Generally persistent classes are generated from the model as described above, so users do not have to worry about superclass and property implementation details.

Persistent interface provides access to 3 persistence-related properties - objectId, persistenceState and objectContext. All 3 are initialized by Cayenne runtime framework. Application code should not attempt to change them. However it is allowed to read them, which provides valuable runtime information. E.g. ObjectId can be used for quick equality check of 2 objects, knowing persistence state would allow highlighting changed objects, etc.

Each persistent object belongs to a single ObjectContext, and can be in one of the following persistence states (as defined in org.apache.cayenne.PersistenceState) :

One of the first things users usually want to do with an ObjectContext is to select some objects from a database:

We’ll discuss queries in some detail in the Queries chapter. The example above is self-explanatory - we create a ObjectSelect that matches all Artist objects present in the database, and then use select to get the result.

Some queries can be quite complex, returning multiple result sets or even updating the database. For such queries ObjectContext provides performGenericQuery() method. While not commonly-used, it is nevertheless important in some situations. E.g.:

An application might modify selected objects. E.g.:

The first time the object property is changed, the object’s state is automatically set to MODIFIED by Cayenne. Cayenne tracks all in-memory changes until a user calls commitChanges:

At this point all in-memory changes are analyzed and a minimal set of SQL statements is issued in a single transaction to synchronize the database with the in-memory state. In our example commitChanges commits just one object, but generally it can be any number of objects.

If instead of commit, we wanted to reset all changed objects to the previously committed state, we’d call rollbackChanges instead:

newObject method call creates a persistent object and sets its state to NEW:

It will only exist in memory until commitChanges is issued. On commit Cayenne might generate a new primary key (unless a user set it explicitly, or a PK was inferred from a relationship) and issue an INSERT SQL statement to permanently store the object.

deleteObjects method takes one or more Persistent objects and marks them as DELETED:

Additionally deleteObjects processes all delete rules modeled for the affected objects. This may result in implicitly deleting or modifying extra related objects. Same as insert and update, delete operations are sent to the database only when commitChanges is called. Similarly rollbackChanges will undo the effect of newObject and deleteObjects.

localObject returns a copy of a given persistent object that is local to a given ObjectContext:

Since an application often works with more than one context, localObject is a rather common operation. E.g. to improve performance a user might utilize a single shared context to select and cache data, and then occasionally transfer some selected objects to another context to modify and commit them:

Often an application needs to inspect mapping metadata. This information is stored in the EntityResolver object, accessible via the ObjectContext:

Here we discussed the most commonly used subset of the ObjectContext API. There are other useful methods, e.g. those allowing to inspect registered objects state in bulk, etc. Check the latest JavaDocs for details.

There is a useful helper class called Cayenne (fully-qualified name org.apache.cayenne.Cayenne) that builds on ObjectContext API to provide a number of very common operations. E.g. get a primary key (most entities do not model PK as an object property) :

It also provides the reverse operation - finding an object given a known PK:

If a query is expected to return 0 or 1 object, Cayenne helper class can be used to find this object. It throws an exception if more than one object matched the query:

Feel free to explore Cayenne class API for other useful methods.

In all the examples shown so far an ObjectContext would directly connect to a database to select data or synchronize its state (either via commit or rollback). However another context can be used in all these scenarios instead of a database. This concept is called ObjectContext "nesting". Nesting is a parent/child relationship between two contexts, where child is a nested context and selects or commits its objects via a parent.

Nesting is useful to create isolated object editing areas (child contexts) that need to all be committed to an intermediate in-memory store (parent context), or rolled back without affecting changes already recorded in the parent. Think cascading GUI dialogs, or parallel AJAX requests coming to the same session.

In theory Cayenne supports any number of nesting levels, however applications should generally stay with one or two, as deep hierarchies will most certainly degrade the performance of the deeply nested child contexts. This is due to the fact that each context in a nesting chain has to update its own objects during most operations.

Cayenne ROP is an extreme case of nesting when a child context is located in a separate JVM and communicates with its parent via a web service. ROP is discussed in details in the following chapters. Here we concentrate on the same-VM nesting.

To create a nested context, use an instance of ServerRuntime, passing it the desired parent:

From here a nested context operates just like a regular context (you can perform queries, create and delete objects, etc.). The only difference is that commit and rollback operations can either be limited to synchronization with the parent, or cascade all the way to the database:

As described in the CayenneModeler chapter, Cayenne supports mapping of completely generic classes to specific entities. Although for conveniece most applications should stick with entity-specific class mappings, the generic feature offers some interesting possibilities, such as creating mappings completely on the fly in a running application, etc.

Generic objects are first class citizens in Cayenne, and all common persistent operations apply to them as well. There are some pecularities however, described below.

When creating a new generic object, either cast your ObjectContext to DataContext (that provides newObject(String) API), or provide your object with an explicit ObjectId:

SelectQuery for generic object should be created passing entity name String in constructor, instead of a Java class:

Use DataObject API to access and modify properties of a generic object:

This is how an application can obtain entity name of a generic object:

Considering how much attention is given to managing transactions in most other ORMs, transactions have been conspicuously absent from the ObjectContext discussion till now. The reason is that transactions are seamless in Cayenne in all but a few special cases. ObjectContext is an in-memory container of objects that is disconnected from the database, except when it needs to run an operation. So it does not care about any surrounding transaction scope. Sure enough all database operations are transactional, so when an application does a commit, all SQL execution is wrapped in a database transaction. But this is done behind the scenes and is rarely a concern to the application code.

Two cases where transactions need to be taken into consideration are container- and application-managed transactions.

If you are using Spring, EJB or another environment that manages transactions, you’ll likely need to switch Cayenne runtime into "external transactions mode". This is done by setting DI configuration property defined in Constants.SERVER_EXTERNAL_TX_PROPERTY (see Appendix A). If this property is set to "true", Cayenne assumes that JDBC Connections obtained by runtime whenever that might happen are all coming from a transactional DataSource managed by the container. In this case Cayenne does not attempt to commit or rollback the connections, leaving it up to the container to do that when appropriate.

In the second scenario, an application might need to define its own transaction scope that spans more than one Cayenne operation. E.g. two sequential commits that need to be rolled back together in case of failure. This can be done via ServerRuntime.performInTransaction method:

When inside a transaction, current thread Transaction object can be accessed via a static method:

You can control transaction isolation level and propagation logic using TransactionDescriptor.

Before discussing how to build expressions, it is important to understand one group of expressions widely used in Cayenne - path expressions. There are two types of path expressions - object and database, used for navigating graphs of connected objects or joined DB tables respectively. Object paths are much more commonly used, as after all Cayenne is supposed to provide a degree of isolation of the object model from the database. However database paths are helpful in certain situations. General structure of path expressions is the following:

An object path expression represents a chain of property names rooted in a certain (unspecified during expression creation) object and "navigating" to its related value. E.g. a path expression "artist.name" might be a property path starting from a Painting object, pointing to the related Artist object, and then to its name attribute. A few more examples:

Similarly a database path expression is a dot-separated path through DB table joins and columns. In Cayenne joins are mapped as DbRelationships with some symbolic names (the closest concept to DbRelationship name in the DB world is a named foreign key constraint. But DbRelationship names are usually chosen arbitrarily, without regard to constraints naming or even constraints presence). A database path therefore might look like this - db:dbrelationshipX.dbrelationshipY.COLUMN_Z". More specific examples:

Cayenne supports "aliases" in path Expressions. E.g. the same expression can be written using explicit path or an alias:

SelectQuery using the second form of the path expression must be made aware of the alias via SelectQuery.aliasPathSplits(..), otherwise an Exception will be thrown. The main use of aliases is to allow users to control how SQL joins are generated if the same path is encountered more than once in any given Expression. Each alias for any given path would result in a separate join. Without aliases, a single join will be used for a group of matching paths.

While in most cases users are likely to rely on API from the following section for expression creation, we’ll start by showing String expressions, as this will help to understand the semantics. A Cayenne expression can be represented as a String, which can be converted to an expression object using ExpressionFactory.exp static method. Here is an example:

This particular expression may be used to match Paintings whose names that start with "A" and whose price is less than $1000. While this example is pretty self-explanatory, there are a few points worth mentioning. "name" and "price" here are object paths discussed earlier. As always, paths themselves are not attached to a specific root entity and can be applied to any entity that has similarly named attributes or relationships. So when we are saying that this expression "may be used to match Paintings", we are implying that there may be other entities, for which this expression is valid. Now the expression details…​

Character constants that are not paths or numeric values should be enclosed in single or double quotes. Two of the expressions below are equivalent:

Case sensitivity. Expression operators are case sensitive and are usually lowercase. Complex words follow the Java camel-case style:

Grouping with parenthesis:

Path prefixes. Object expressions are unquoted strings, optionally prefixed by obj: (usually they are not prefixed at all actually). Database expressions are always prefixed with db:. A special kind of prefix, not discussed yet is enum: that prefixes an enumeration constant:

Binary conditions are expressions that contain a path on the left, a value on the right, and some operation between them, such as equals, like, etc. They can be used as qualifiers in SelectQueries:

Parameters. Expressions can contain named parameters (names that start with "$") that can be substituted with values either by name or by position. Parameterized expressions allow to create reusable expression templates. Also if an Expression contains a complex object that doesn’t have a simple String representation (e.g. a Date, a DataObject, an ObjectId), parameterizing such expression is the only way to represent it as String. Here are the examples of both positional and named parameter bindings:

Positional binding is usually shorter. You can pass positional bindings to the exp(..) factory method (its second argument is a params vararg):

In parameterized expressions with LIKE clause, SQL wildcards must be part of the values in the Map and not the expression string itself:

When matching on a relationship, the value parameter must be either a Persistent object, an org.apache.cayenne.ObjectId, or a numeric ID value (for single column IDs). E.g.:

When using positional binding, Cayenne would expect values for all parameters to be present. Binding by name offers extra flexibility: subexpressions with uninitialized parameters are automatically pruned from the expression. So e.g. if certain parts of the expression criteria are not provided to the application, you can still build a valid expression:

Null handling. Handling of Java nulls as operands is no different from normal values. Instead of using special conditional operators, like SQL does (IS NULL, IS NOT NULL), "=" and "!=" expressions are used directly with null values. It is up to Cayenne to translate expressions with nulls to the valid SQL.

Creating expressions from Strings is a powerful and dynamic approach, however a safer alternative is to use Java API. It provides compile-time checking of expressions validity. The API in question is provided by ExpressionFactory class (that we’ve seen already), Property class and Expression class itself. ExpressionFactory contains a number of self-explanatory static methods that can be used to build expressions. E.g.:

As discussed earlier, Cayenne supports aliases in path Expressions, allowing to control how SQL joins are generated if the same path is encountered more than once in the same Expression. Two ExpressionFactory methods allow to implicitly generate aliases to "split" match paths into individual joins if needed:

"Path" argument to both of these methods can use a split character (a pipe symbol '|') instead of dot to indicate that relationship following a path should be split into a separate set of joins, one per collection value. There can only be one split at most in any given path. Split must always precede a relationship. E.g. "|exhibits.paintings", "exhibits|paintings", etc. Internally Cayenne would generate distinct aliases for each of the split expressions, forcing separate joins.

While ExpressionFactory is pretty powerful, there’s an even easier way to create expression using static Property objects generated by Cayenne for each persistent class. Some examples:

Property objects provide the API mostly analogius to ExpressionFactory, though it is significantly shorter and is aware of the value types. It provides compile-time checks of both property names and types of arguments in conditions. We will use Property-based API in further examples.

When used in a query, an expression is converted to SQL WHERE clause (or ORDER BY clause) by Cayenne during query execution. Thus the actual evaluation against the data is done by the database engine. However the same expressions can also be used for accessing object properties, calculating values, in-memory filtering.

Checking whether an object satisfies an expression:

Reading property value:

Filtering a list of objects:

EJBQL is a textual query language that can be used with Cayenne. In some situations, it is convenient to be able to convert Expression instances into EJBQL. Expressions support this conversion. An example is shown below.

This would be equivalent to the following purely EJBQL querying logic;

This query allows to search objects by their ID. It’s introduced in Cayenne 4.0 and uses new "fluent" API same as ObjectSelect query.

Here is example of how to use it:

SQL is very powerful and allows to manipulate data in ways that can not always be described as a graph of related entities. Cayenne acknowledges this fact and provides a facility to execute SQL, sometimes allowing to map results back to persistent objects. SQLSelect and SQLExec are a pair of queries that allow to run native SQL. SQLSelect can be used (as the name suggests) to select custom data in form of entities, separate columns, collection of DataRow or Object[]. SQLExec is designed to execute any SQL (e.g. updates, deletes, DDLs, etc.).

Both queries support advanced SQL templating, with variable substitution and special directives as described in the next chapter. Here we’ll just provide a few simple examples:

And here is an example of how to use SQLExec:

A powerful feature of SQLSelect and SQLExec is that SQL string is treated by Cayenne as a dynamic template. Before creating a PreparedStatement, the String is evaluated, resolving its dynamic parts. The two main scripting elements are "variables" (that look like $var) and "directives" (that look like #directive(p1 p2 p3)). In the discussion below we’ll use both selecting and updating examples, as scripting works the same way for both SQLSelect and SQLExec.

MappedSelect and MappedExec is a queries that are just a reference to another queries stored in the DataMap. The actual stored query can be SelectQuery, SQLTemplate, EJBQLQuery, etc. Difference between MappedSelect and MappedExec is (as reflected in their names) whether underlying query intended to select data or just to perform some generic SQL code.

Here is example of how to use MappedSelect:

And here is example of MappedExec:

Stored procedures are mapped as separate objects in CayenneModeler. ProcedureCall provides a way to execute them with a certain set of parameters. This query is a "fluent" version of older ProcedureQuery. Just like with SQLTemplate, the outcome of a procedure can be anything - a single result set, multiple result sets, some data modification (returned as an update count), or a combination of these. So use root class to get a single result set, and use only procedure name for anything else:

A stored procedure can return data back to the application as result sets or via OUT parameters. To simplify the processing of the query output, QueryResponse treats OUT parameters as if it was a separate result set. For stored procedures declaref any OUT or INOUT parameters, ProcedureResult have convenient utility method to get them:

There maybe a situation when a stored procedure handles its own transactions, but an application is configured to use Cayenne-managed transactions. This is obviously conflicting and undesirable behavior. In this case ProcedureQueries should be executed explicitly wrapped in an "external" Transaction. This is one of the few cases when a user should worry about transactions at all. See Transactions section for more details.

EJBQLQuery was created as a part of an experiment in adopting some of Java Persistence API (JPA) approaches in Cayenne. It is a parameterized object query that is created from query String. A String used to build EJBQLQuery follows JPQL (JPA Query Language) syntax:

JPQL details can be found in any JPA manual. Here we’ll focus on how this fits into Cayenne and what are the differences between EJBQL and other Cayenne queries.

Although most frequently EJBQLQuery is used as an alternative to ObjectSelect, there are also DELETE and UPDATE varieties available.

In most cases ObjectSelect is preferred to EJBQLQuery, as it is API-based, and provides you with better compile-time checks. However sometimes you may want a completely scriptable object query. This is when you might prefer EJBQL. A more practical reason for picking EJBQL over ObjectSelect though is that the former offers a few extra capabilities, such as subqueries.

Just like ObjectSelect EJBQLQuery can return a List of Object[] elements, where each entry in an array is either a DataObject or a scalar, depending on the query SELECT clause.

A result can also be a list of scalars:

EJBQLQuery supports an "IN" clause with three different usage-patterns. The following example would require three individual positional parameters (named parameters could also have been used) to be supplied.

The following example requires a single positional parameter to be supplied. The parameter can be any concrete implementation of the java.util.Collection interface such as java.util.List or java.util.Set.

The following example is functionally identical to the one prior.

It is possible to convert an Expression object used with a ObjectSelect to EJBQL. Use the Expression#appendAsEJBQL methods for this purpose.

While Cayenne Expressions discussed previously can be thought of as identical to JPQL WHERE clause, and indeed they are very close, there are a few notable differences:

If a user needs some extra functionality not addressed by the existing set of Cayenne queries, he can write his own. The only requirement is to implement org.apache.cayenne.query.Query interface. The easiest way to go about it is to subclass some of the base queries in Cayenne.

E.g. to do something directly in the JDBC layer, you might subclass AbstractQuery:

To delegate the actual query execution to a standard Cayenne query, you may subclass IndirectQuery:

In fact many internal Cayenne queries are IndirectQueries, delegating to SelectQuery or SQLTemplate after some preprocessing.

Cayenne defines the following 8 types of lifecycle events for which callbacks can be regsitered:

Callback methods on Persistent classes are mapped in CayenneModeler for each ObjEntity. Empty callback methods are automatically created as a part of class generation (either with Maven, Ant or the Modeler) and are later filled with appropriate logic by the programmer. E.g. assuming we mapped a 'post-add' callback called 'onNewOrder' in ObjEntity 'Order', the following code will be generated:

As onNewOrder() is already declared in the mapping, it does not need to be registered explicitly. Implementing the method in subclass to do something meaningful is all that is required at this point.

As a rule callback methods do not have any knowledge of the outside application, and can only access the state of the object itself and possibly the state of other persistent objects via object’s own ObjectContext.

A listener is simply some application class that has one or more annotated callback methods. A callback method signature should be void someMethod(SomePersistentType object). It can be public, private, protected or use default access:

Notice that the example above contains an annotation on the callback method that defines the type of the event this method should be called for. Before we go into annotation details, we’ll show how to create and register a listener with Cayenne. It is always a user responsibility to register desired application listeners, usually right after ServerRuntime is started. Here is an example:

First let’s define 2 simple listeners.

Ignore the annotations for a minute. The important point here is that the listeners are arbitrary classes unmapped and unknown to Cayenne, that contain some callback methods. Now let’s register them with runtime:

Listeners in this example are very simple. However they don’t have to be. Unlike Persistent objects, normally listeners initialization is managed by the application code, not Cayenne, so listeners may have knowledge of various application services, operation transactional context, etc. Besides a single listener can apply to multiple entities. As a consequence their callbacks can do more than just access a single ObjectContext.

Now let’s discuss the annotations. There are eight annotations exactly matching the names of eight lifecycle events. A callback method in a listener should be annotated with at least one, but possibly with more than one of them. Annotation itself defines what event the callback should react to. Annotation parameters are essentially an entity filter, defining a subset of ObjEntities whose events we are interested in:

As shown above, "value" (the implicit annotation parameter) can contain one or more entity classes. Only these entities' events will result in callback invocation. There’s also another way to match entities - via custom annotations. This allows to match any number of entities without even knowing what they are. Here is an example. We’ll first define a custom annotation:

Now we can define a listener that will react to events from ObjEntities annotated with this annotation:

As you see we don’t have any entities yet, still we can define a listener that does something useful. Now let’s annotate some entities:

A final touch in the listeners design is preserving the state of the listener within a single select or commit, so that events generated by multiple objects can be collected and processed all together. To do that you will need to implement a DataChannelSyncFilter (and/or DataChannelQueryFilter), and add some callback methods to it. They will store their state in a ThreadLocal variable of the filter. Here is an example filter that does something pretty meaningless - counts how many total objects were committed. However it demonstrates the important pattern of aggregating multiple events and presenting a combined result:

Now since this is both a filter and a listener, it needs to be registered as such:

Prefetching is a technique that allows to bring back in one query not only the queried objects, but also objects related to them. In other words it is a controlled eager relationship resolving mechanism. Prefetching is discussed in the "Performance Tuning" chapter, as it is a powerful performance optimization method. However another common application of prefetching is to refresh stale object relationships, so more generally it can be viewed as a technique for managing subsets of the object graph.

Prefetching example:

All types of relationships can be preftetched - to-one, to-many, flattened. A prefetch can span multiple relationships:

A query can have multiple prefetches:

If a query is fetching DataRows, all "disjoint" prefetches are ignored, only "joint" prefetches are executed (see prefetching semantics discussion below for what disjoint and joint prefetches mean).

A strategy to prefetch relationships is defined by prefetch "semantics". Depending on semantics, Cayenne would generate different types of queries. The end result is the same - query root objects with related objects fully resolved. However semantics can affect performance, in some cases significantly. There are 3 types of prefetch semantics defined as constants in org.apache.cayenne.query.PrefetchTreeNode:

Disjoint prefetch semantics results in Cayenne generating one SQL statement for the main objects, and a separate statement for each prefetch path (hence "disjoint" - related objects are not fetched with the main query). Each additional SQL statement uses a qualifier of the main query plus a set of joins traversing the prefetch path between the main and related entity.

This strategy has an advantage of efficient JVM memory use, and faster overall result processing by Cayenne, but it requires (1+N) SQL statements to be executed, where N is the number of prefetched relationships.

Disjoint-by-ID prefetch semantics is a variation of disjoint prefetch where related objects are matched against a set of IDs derived from the fetched main objects (or intermediate objects in a multi-step prefetch). Cayenne limits the size of the generated WHERE clause, as most DBs can’t parse arbitrary large SQL. So prefetch queries are broken into smaller queries. The size of is controlled by the DI property Constants.SERVER_MAX_ID_QUALIFIER_SIZE_PROPERTY (the default number of conditions in the generated WHERE clause is 10000). Cayenne will generate (1 + N * M) SQL statements for each query using disjoint-by-ID prefetches, where N is the number of relationships to prefetch, and M is the number of queries for a given prefetch that is dependent on the number of objects in the result (ideally M = 1).

The advantage of this type of prefetch is that matching database rows by ID may be much faster than matching the qualifier of the original query. Moreover this is the only type of prefetch that can handle SelectQueries with fetch limit. Both joint and regular disjoint prefetches may produce invalid results or generate inefficient fetch-the-entire table SQL when fetch limit is in effect.

The disadvantage is that query SQL can get unwieldy for large result sets, as each object will have to have its own condition in the WHERE clause of the generated SQL.

Joint prefetch semantics results in a single SQL statement for root objects and any number of jointly prefetched paths. Cayenne processes in memory a cartesian product of the entities involved, converting it to an object tree. It uses OUTER joins to connect prefetched entities.

Joint is the most efficient prefetch type of the three as far as generated SQL goes. There’s always just 1 SQL query generated. Its downsides are the potentially increased amount of data that needs to get across the network between the application server and the database, and more data processing that needs to be done on the Cayenne side.

ObjectSelect query supports all three types of semantics. You can mix and match them in the same query for different prefetches.

SQLSelect query supports "JOINT" and "DISJOINT_BY_ID". It does not work with "DISJOINT", as the query does not provide enough information to Cayenne to build dependent prefetch queries. So "DISJOINT" will result in exception. "JOINT" prefetching requires a bit of effort shaping the SQL to include the right columns in the result and label them properly to be convertable into object properties. The main rules to follow are:

E.g.:

EJBQLQuery uses the "FETCH" keyword to enable prefetching:

Converting result set data to Persistent objects and registering these objects in the ObjectContext can be an expensive operation comparable to the time spent running the query (and frequently exceeding it). Internally Cayenne builds the result as a list of DataRows, that are later converted to objects. Skipping the last step and using data in the form of DataRows can significantly increase performance.

DataRow is a simply a map of values keyed by their DB column name. It is a ubiqutous representation of DB data used internally by Cayenne. And it can be quite usable as is in the application in many cases. So performance sensitive selects should consider DataRows - it saves memory and CPU cycles. All selecting queries support DataRows option, e.g.:

Individual DataRows may be converted to Persistent objects as needed. So e.g. you may implement some in-memory filtering, only converting a subset of fetched objects:

It is possible to fetch specific attributes and relationships from a model using EJBQLQuery. The following example would return a java.util.List of String objects;

The following will yield a java.util.List containing Object[] instances, each of which would contain the name followed by the dateOfBirth value.

Refer to third-party query language documentation for further detail on this mechanism.

While contemporary hardware may easily allow applications to fetch hundreds of thousands or even millions of objects into memory, it doesn’t mean this is always a good idea to do so. You can optimize processing of very large result sets with two techniques discussed in this and the following chapter - iterated and paginated queries.

Iterated query is not actually a special query. Any selecting query can be executed in iterated mode by an ObjectContext. ObjectContext creates an object called ResultIterator that is backed by an open ResultSet. Iterator provides constant memory performance for arbitrarily large ResultSets. This is true at least on the Cayenne end, as JDBC driver may still decide to bring the entire ResultSet into the JVM memory.

Data is read from ResultIterator one row/object at a time until it is exhausted. There are two styles of accessing ResultIterator - direct access which requires explicit closing to avoid JDBC resources leak, or a callback that lets Cayenne handle resource management. In both cases iteration can be performed using "for" loop, as ResultIterator is "Iterable".

Direct access. Here common sense tells us that ResultIterators instances should be processed and closed as soon as possible to release the DB connection. E.g. storing open iterators between HTTP requests for unpredictable length of time would quickly exhaust the connection pool.

Same thing with a callback:

Another example is a batch iterator that allows to process more than one object in each iteration. This is a common scenario in various data processing jobs - read a batch of objects, process them, commit the results, and then repeat. This allows to further optimize processing (e.g. by avoiding frequent commits).

Enabling query pagination allows to load very large result sets in a Java app with very little memory overhead (much smaller than even the DataRows option discussed above). Moreover it is completely transparent to the application - a user gets what appears to be a list of Persistent objects - there’s no iterator to close or DataRows to convert to objects:

Having said that, DataRows option can be combined with pagination, providing the best of both worlds:

The way pagination works internally, it first fetches a list of IDs for the root entity of the query. This is very fast and initially takes very little memory. Then when an object is requested at an arbitrary index in the list, this object and adjacent objects (a "page" of objects that is determined by the query pageSize parameter) are fetched together by ID. Subsequent requests to the objects of this "page" are served from memory.

An obvious limitation of pagination is that if you eventually access all objects in the list, the memory use will end up being the same as with no pagination. However it is still a very useful approach. With some lists (e.g. multi-page search results) only a few top objects are normally accessed. At the same time pagination allows to estimate the full list size without fetching all the objects. And again - it is completely transparent and looks like a normal query.

By default when a single ObjectContext commits its changes, all other contexts in the same runtime receive an event that contains all the committed changes. This allows them to update their cached object state to match the latest committed data. There are however many problems with this ostensibly helpful feature. In short - it works well in environments with few contexts and in unclustered scenarios, such as single user desktop applications, or simple webapps with only a few users. More specifically:

So we’ve made a good case for disabling synchronization in most webapps. To do that, set to "false" the following DI property - Constants.SERVER_CONTEXTS_SYNC_PROPERTY, using one of the standard Cayenne DI approaches. E.g. from command line:

Or by changing the standard properties Map in a custom extensions module:

Cayenne runtime is built around a small powerful dependency injection (DI) container. Just like other popular DI technologies, such as Spring or Guice, Cayenne DI container manages sets of interdependent objects and allows users to configure them. These objects are regular Java objects. We are calling them "services" in this document to distinguish from all other objects that are not configured in the container and are not managed. DI container is responsible for service instantiation, injecting correct dependencies, maintaining service instances scope, and dispatching scope events to services.

The services are configured in special Java classes called "modules". Each module defines binding of service interfaces to implementation instances, implementation types or providers of implementation instances. There are no XML configuration files, and all the bindings are type-safe. The container supports injection into instance variables and constructor parameters based on the @Inject annotation. This mechanism is very close to Google Guice.

The discussion later in this chapter demonstrates a standalone DI container. But keep in mind that Cayenne already has a built-in Injector, and a set of default modules. A Cayenne user would normally only use the API below to write custom extension modules that will be loaded in that existing container when creating ServerRuntime. See "Starting and Stopping ServerRuntime" chapter for an example of passing an extension module to Cayenne.

Cayenne DI probably has ~80% of the features expected in a DI container and has no dependency on the rest of Cayenne, so in theory can be used as an application-wide DI engine. But it’s primary purpose is still to serve Cayenne. Hence there are no plans to expand it beyond Cayenne needs. It is an ideal "embedded" DI that does not interfere with Spring, Guice or any other such framework present elsewhere in the application.

The previous section discussed how Cayenne DI works in general terms. Since Cayenne users will mostly be dealing with an existing Injector provided by ServerRuntime, it is important to understand how to build custom extensions to a preconfigured container. As shown in "Starting and Stopping ServerRuntime" chapter, custom extensions are done by writing an application DI module (or multiple modules) that configures service overrides. This section shows all the configuration possibilities in detail, including changing properties of the existing services, contributing services to standard service lists and maps, and overriding service implementations. All the code examples later in this section are assumed to be placed in an application module "configure" method:

"Remote Object Persistence" is a low-overhead web services-based technology that provides lightweight object persistence and query functionality to 'remote' applications. In other words it provides familiar Cayenne API to applications that do not have direct access to the database. Instead such applications would access Cayenne Web Service (CWS). A single abstract data model (expressed as Cayenne XML DataMap) is used on the server and on the client, while execution logic can be partitioned between the tiers.The following picture compares a regular Cayenne web application and a rich client application that uses remote object persistence technology:

Persistence stack above consists of the following parts:

Recent versions of Tomcat and Jetty containers (e.g. Tomcat 6 and 7, Jetty 8) contain code addressing a security concern related to "session fixation problem" by resetting the existing session ID of any request that requires BASIC authentication. If ROP service is protected with declarative security (see the ROP tutorial and the following chapters on security), this feature prevents the ROP client from attaching to its session, resulting in MissingSessionExceptions.

To solve that you will need to either switch to an alternative security mechanism, or disable "session fixation problem" protections of the container. E.g. the later can be achieved in Tomcat 7 by adding the following context.xml file to the webapp’s META-INF/ directory:

(The <Valve> tag can also be placed within the <Context> in any other locations used by Tomcat to load context configurations)

An ORM system consists of three parts: database, OR mapping and persistent Java classes. These parts always need to be kept in sync with each other for the application to work. "DB-first" flow is a common and practical approach to synchronization that assumes the database to be the master source of the metadata, with other two parts synchronized from the DB as the schema evolves. Cayenne provides a number of tools to automate and control it. Here is how "DB-first" flow is typically implemented:

"cgen" and "cdbimport" tools can be invoked from Maven or Ant as discussed in the "Including Cayenne in a Project" chapter or run from CayenneModeler. This chapter will mostly focus on "cdbimport".

Here is simple maven configuration to start with:

Here is a simple Maven configuration of "cdbimport" (for details see cayenne-maven-plugin documentation)

In the next chapters we will discuss various filtering and other reverse-engineering options.

The simplest example of reverse engineering is processing tables from one schema of catalog and there are several options to do this. Basic syntax is described below:

The same options are available for catalogs:

Cayenne supports combination of different schemas and catalogs, and it filters data according to your requirements. You could achieve this by the following example of reverse engineering configuration:

In the example above, Cayenne reverse engineering process contains three catalogs named as shop_01, shop_02 and shop_03, each of wich has their own schemas. Cayenne will load all data only from the declared catalogs and schemas.

If you want to load everything from database, you could simply declare catalog specification alone.

If you want to do reverse engineering for specific schemas, just remove unwanted schemas from the catalog section. For example, if you want to process schema-name-01 and schema-name-03 schemas only, then you should change reverse engineering section like this.

Cayenne reverse engineering let you fine tune table, columns and stored procedures names that you need to import to your model file. In every filter you can use regexp syntax. Here is some examples of configuration for common tasks.

1) Include tables with ‘CRM_’ prefix if you are working in that domain of application:

2) Include tables with ‘_LOOKUP’ suffix

3) Exclude tables with ‘CRM_’ prefix if you are not working only in that domain of application:

4) Include only specific columns that follows specific naming convention:

5) Exclude system or obsolete columns:

6) Include/Exclude columns for particular table or group of tables:

7) Include stored procedures:

8) Exclude stored procedures by pattern:

9) Exclude relationships:

All filtering tags <includeTable>, <excludeTable>, <includeColumn>, <excludeColumn>, <includeProcedure>, <excludeProcedure> and <excludeRelationship> have 2 ways to pass filtering RegExp.

1) text inside tag

2) pattern inner tag

All filtering tags can be placed inside schema and catalog tags, but also inside <dbimport> tag. It means that filtering rules will be applied for all schemas and catalogs.

Initially, let’s make a small sample. Consider the following reverse engineering configuration.

In this case reverse engineering will not filter anything from the shop-01 catalog. If you really want to filter database columns, tables, stored procedures and relationships, you could do it in the following way.

Then Cayenne will do reverse engineering for both shop-01 and shop-02 catalogs. First catalog will not be processed for filtering, but the second catalog will be processed with “includeTable-01” filter.

Let’s assume you have a lot of table prefixes with the same names. Cayenne allows you to mention a pattern as regular expression. Using regular expressions is easier way to handle a big amount of database entities than writing filter config for each use-case. They make your configuration more readable, understandable and straightforward. There is not complex. Let’s see how to use patterns in reverse engineering configuration with complete example.

The example above should provide you more idea about how to use filtering and patterns in Cayenne reverse engineering. You could notice that this example demonstrates you the "name" and "pattern" configurations. Yes, you could use these as separates xml element and xml attributes.

The cdbimport will execute reverse engineering task for all entities from “shop-01” and “shop-02”, including tables, views, stored procedures and table columns. As “shop-03” has variety filter tags, entities from this catalog will be filtered by cdbimport.

Here is config sample for Ant task:

You are able to skip relationships loading by the <skipRelationshipsLoading> element.

Another useful Cayenne reverse engineering property is <skipPrimaryKeyLoading>. If you decide to support all relationships at the application layer and avoid their management in database, you’ll find useful to turn off primary keys synchronization at all.

By default, cdbimport imports tables and views. Some databases may support other table-like objects, e.g. SYSTEM TABLE, GLOBAL TEMPORARY, LOCAL TEMPORARY, ALIAS, SYNONYM, etc. To control which types should be included <tableType></tableType> element is used. Some examples:

Import tables only (skip views and others and other types):

Tables and views (the default option):

Reverse Engineering dialog.

Here is a list of options to tune what will be processed by reverse engineering:

Then you click Run Import or Configure Connection to set DataSource. If you don’t have any DataSource yet you can create one from this menu.

Datasource selection dialog.

Then click continue to start dbImport.

Module supports autoloading mechanism, so no other actions required to enable it. Just mark your entities with @CacheGroups annotation and you are ready to use it:

After any modification of MyEntity objects cache group "some-group" will be dropped from cache automatically.

In case you need some complex logic of cache invalidation you can disable default behaviour and provide your own.

To do so you need to implement o.a.c.cache.invalidation.InvalidationHandler interface and setup Cache Invalidation module to use it. Let’s use implementation class called CustomInvalidationHandler that will simply match all entities' types with "custom-group" cache group regardless of any annotations:

Now we’ll set up it’s usage by ServerRuntime:

In order to use commitlog module you need to perform three steps:

To use JCache provider in your app you need to include this module and caching provider libs (e.g. Ehcache). You can provide own implementation of org.apache.cayenne.jcache.JCacheConfigurationFactory to customize cache configuration if required.

For advanced configuration and management please use provider specific options and tools.

JCache module supports custom configuration files for cache managers.

Also JCache module supports contribution of preconfigured cache manager.

You may else be interested in Cache Invalidation Extension.

Here is an example of using ehcache as cache manager.

First you need to include ehcache dependency:

If you need custom configuration you can contribute configuration file to JCache module:

As a result you will have ehcache manager as your default cache manager.

This module doesn’t require any additional setup.

This module doesn’t require any additional setup. In addition of directives mentioned in this chapter, this module also adds #chain and #chunk directives.

#chain and #chunk directives are used for conditional inclusion of SQL code. They are used together with #chain wrapping multiple #chunks. A chunk evaluates its parameter expression and if it is NULL suppresses rendering of the enclosed SQL block. A chain renders its prefix and its chunks joined by the operator. If all the chunks are suppressed, the chain itself is suppressed. This allows to work with otherwise hard to script SQL semantics. E.g. a WHERE clause can contain multiple conditions joined with AND or OR. Application code would like to exclude a condition if its right-hand parameter is not present (similar to Expression pruning discussed above). If all conditions are excluded, the entire WHERE clause should be excluded. chain/chunk allows to do that.

Semantics:

Full example:

cgen is a goal that generates and maintains source (.java) files of persistent objects based on a DataMap. By default, it is bound to the generate-sources phase. If "makePairs" is set to "true" (which is the recommended default), this task will generate a pair of classes (superclass/subclass) for each ObjEntity in the DataMap. Superclasses should not be changed manually, since they are always overwritten. Subclasses are never overwritten and may be later customized by the user. If "makePairs" is set to "false", a single class will be generated for each ObjEntity.

By creating custom templates, you can use cgen to generate other output (such as web pages, reports, specialized code templates) based on DataMap information.

Example - a typical class generation scenario, where pairs of classes are generated with default Maven source destination and superclass package:

cdbimport is a cayenne-maven-plugin goal that generates a DataMap based on an existing database schema. By default, it is bound to the generate-sources phase. This allows you to generate your DataMap prior to building your project, possibly followed by "cgen" execution to generate the classes. CDBImport plugin described in details in chapter DB-First Flow

Example - loading a DB schema from a local HSQLDB database (essentially a reverse operation compared to the cdbgen example above) :

cdbgen is a cayenne-maven-plugin goal that drops and/or generates tables in a database on Cayenne DataMap. By default, it is bound to the pre-integration-test phase.

Example - creating a DB schema on a local HSQLDB database:

Cgen task generates Java classes based on your DataMap, it has same configuration parameters as in Maven Plugin version, described in Table, “cgen required parameters”.. If you provided default DataMap via cayenne.defaultDataMap, you can skip cgen configuration as default settings will suffice in common case.

Here is how you can change settings of the default cgen task:

And here is example of how to define additional cgen task (e.g. for client classes if you are using ROP):

This task is for creating and synchronizing your Cayenne model from database schema. Full list of parameters are same as in Maven Plugin, with the exception that Gradle version will use Groovy instead of XML. Here is example of configuration for cdbimport task:

Cdbgen task drops and/or generates tables in a database on Cayenne DataMap. Full list of parameters is same as in the Maven plugin. Here is example of how to configure default cdbgen task:

You can connect Cayenne tasks to the default build lifecycle. Here is short example of how to connect defaut cgen and cdbimport tasks with compileJava task:

This is an Ant counterpart of "cdbimport" goal of cayenne-maven-plugin described above. It has exactly the same properties. Here is a usage example: