Question

In my web app,I am using hibernate and hsqldb for database operations..and use Ant for build management.I have a local.properties containing db.url,db.driver etc.They contain production db values.

In hibernate.cfg.xml ,I am again providing these db parameters as properties inside SessionFactory elements.

In Ant buildfile ,I am using local.properties as the properties file so that I can create a target for starting db.

Finally ,In my dao implementation ,I am using a HibernateUtil class to create session factory
With these in place I am able to access myappdb .

My problem is that ,I need to use a different db for testing purposes.
I have some junit test classes and some cactus tests which need to work on myapptestdb.Currently what I am doing ,is replace all db related parameters in local.properties and hibernate.cfg.xml with the testdb values.

ie, replace myappdb with myapptestdb etc..
I know,this is not the correct way to do this..Can someone suggest a better solution for this?

thanks in advance,

mark

The relevant portions of various configuration files in my project are given below.

local.properties

   db.driver=org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver
    db.server.class=org.hsqldb.server.Server
    db.url=jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost:9005/myappdb
    db.username=SA
    db.password=SA
    hport=9005
    dir.data=data
    halias=myappdb
    hjar=lib/hsqldb.jar
    hfile=--database.0 data/myappdb
   ...

hibernate.cfg.xml

<session-factory>
<property name="connection.driver_class">
    org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver
</property>
<property name="connection.url">
    jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost:9005/myappdb;create=true
</property>
<property name="connection.username">SA</property>
<property name="connection.password">SA</property>
...
</session-factory>

build.xml

<property file="local.properties" />
...
<target name="startdb" description="start hsqldb in server mode">
        <java fork="true" classname="${db.server.class}"  >
            <classpath>
                <path location="${dir.lib}/hsqldb.jar"/>
            </classpath>
            <arg value="-database.0"/>
            <arg value="${dir.data}/${halias}"/>
            <arg value="-dbname.0"/>
            <arg value="${halias}"/>
            <arg value="-port"/>
            <arg value="${hport}"/>
        </java>
    </target>

MyDaoImpl.java

class MyDaoImpl implements MyDao {
    ...
    @Override
    public Object findById(Long id) {
        SessionFactory factory = HibernateUtil.getSessionFactory();
        Session session = factory.openSession();
        Object object = null;
        try {
            object = (Object) session.get(persistentClass, id);
            return object;
        } finally {
            session.close();
        }
    }
...
}

HibernateUtil.java

class HibernateUtil {
    private static SessionFactory sessionFactory;
    public static SessionFactory getSessionFactory() {      
        if (sessionFactory == null){
            try{
                Configuration configuration = new Configuration().configure();
                sessionFactory = configuration.buildSessionFactory();               
            }catch(HibernateException e){
                e.printStackTrace();
                throw e;
            }
        }

        return sessionFactory;
    }
}

Answer 1

Two suggestions:

1) Move to Maven. There you can define <profiles/> which allow you to configure settings for different environments (for example, development, testing, integration testing, production). (I’m not saying you can’t do this with Ant; but it’s a lot more natural under Maven and it doesn’t require a lot of settings). You can also use resource filtering. There is also a separation between production and test code, without you having to do much more than follow a convention.

2) In Ant, you could have two separate copies of the properties file (located in different folders or under different names) and choose one to copy under the name you need – avoiding the need for you to programatically change things. You can do this by passing in a property at build execution time.