2018-11-20 COSTIN MORARIU
In the current project I’m in, we mostly use XML for data interchange between systems. Some of the XML schemas which have been handed to us (final versions) are unfortunatly violating the DRY (Don’t repeat yourself) principle. As we make use of Apache XMLBeans to generate the corresponding Java represenations, this gives us a lot of object duplicates. ArbitraryElement in schema1.xsd and ArbitraryElement in schema2.xsd seem identical in XML, but are defined once in each XSD, which makes XMLBeans generate duplicate objects, one for each occurance in the schemas. This is of course the expected outcome, but it’s not what we want in our hands. We have a lot of business logic surrounding the assembly of the XML content so we would like to use the same code to assemble ArbitraryElement, whether it’s the one from schema1.xsd or schema2.xsd. To implement the business logic with Java’s type safety, it would inevitable lead to Java code duplication. The solution I crafted for this was to use a simple code generator to generate the duplicate code.
First, I refactored the code to duplicate to it’s own class file which only contains such logic which is to be duplicated. I then wrote a small code generator using Apache Commons IO to read the contents of the class, replace the package names, specific method parameters and other appropriate stuff. Here is a simple example:
public class GenerateDuplicateXmlCode { public static void main(final String args[]) { String code = IOUtils.toString(new FileInputStream(new File(PATH + SOURCE + ".java")), "UTF-8"); code = code.replaceAll("my.package.schema1.", "my.package.schema2"); // Replace imports code = code.replaceAll("public class " + SOURCE, "public class " + TARGET); // Replace class name code = code.replaceAll("Schema1TYPE", "Schema2TYPE"); // Replace method parameter type if (code.contains("/**") // Add Javadoc if present code = code.replace("/**", "/**n * Code generated from " + SOURCE + " by " + GenerateDuplicateXmlCode.class.getSimpleName() + "n * "); IOUtils.write(code, new FileOutputStream(new File(PATH + TARGET + ".java")), "UTF-8"); } }
The example above can easily be extended to include more advanced operations and to produce more output files.
Now we just need to implement the business logic once, and for each addition/bug fix etc in the template class (SOURCE in the example above), we just run the code generator and get the equivalent classes with business logic for the duplicate XML object classes, which we check into source control. And yes, the generated classes are test covered!