Question

I have a standalone java application, which uses JPA for its persistence.
Right now I have a persistence.xml in META-INF.My application is currently in development.
My question is that if I move from development to the next envirnoment, say QA. I have to modify the persistence.xml and rebuild the jar. Is this the right way to go about it ?
If not,if I move the connection properties to a different file, where should this file be placed?

<persistence xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence
 http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_2_0.xsd" version="2.0">
    <persistence-unit name="pu1" transaction-type="RESOURCE_LOCAL">
        <provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>
        <class>ClassA</class>
        <class>ClassB</class>
        <class>ClassC</class>
        <class>ClassD</class>


        <properties>
            <property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle9Dialect" />
            <property name="hibernate.connection.driver_class" value="oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver" />
            <property name="hibernate.show_sql" value="true" />
            <property name="hibernate.connection.username" value="username" />
            <property name="hibernate.connection.password" value="password" />
            <property name="hibernate.connection.url"
                value="url" />
            <property name="hibernate.max_fetch_depth" value="3" />
            <property name="hibernate.archive.autodetection" value="class" />
        </properties>
    </persistence-unit>
</persistence>

Thanks in advance !

Answer 1

That’s a good question. Normally, you put all these environment settings in an external file, say application.properties, and pass the location to it to the JVM when you start your application (e.g. -Dconfig.location=/conf/)

Then you should find a way to get the externalized properties into your EntityManagerFactory. You can’t do that in persistence.xml, you can only hard-code things there. But you can do it when creating the entity manager factory by passing vendor properties.

If using a framework like spring, for example, this is easier to do, as spring provides a factory bean for the entity manager. Otherwise you should handle it yourself. Here’s the relevant bit from spring:

provider.createEntityManagerFactory(persistenceUnitInfo, getJpaPropertyMap())