Question

When writing an instance of my data class to the database via ORMLite, and one of the child members (a foreign field) is null, I get back a non null child member.

Data classes as follows:

public class Site {
    //  snip
    @DatabaseField(foreign = true, canBeNull = true)
    private InstallationType installationType;
}

public class InstallationType {   
    @DatabaseField(generatedId = true)
    private int id;
    @DatabaseField
    private String name;
}

When I read my instance of the Site class again via

getSiteDao().queryForId(id);

the installationType member is non null, but with a non-existent id. The only way the rest of our application can now work with this object, is if I manually do a lookup through the InstallationTypeDAO and set what I get back on the site. Query will sometimes return null as per the documentation.

Is there a way of getting ORMLite to set this member to null?

Answer 1

This was a bug in ORMLite that was fixed in version 4.15 (3/7/2011). Here’s the change log file. What version are you using? Have you tried to update? Here’s the bug report page:

Currently the following test passes so I think we have good coverage on that bug.

@Test
public void testForeignNull() throws Exception {
    Dao<Foreign, Integer> dao = createDao(Foreign.class, true);
    Foreign foreign = new Foreign();
    foreign.foo = null;
    assertEquals(1, dao.create(foreign));
    Foreign foreign2 = dao.queryForId(foreign.id);
    assertNotNull(foreign2);
    assertNull(foreign2.foo);
}

With Foreign having the following fields:

@DatabaseField(generatedId = true)
public int id;
@DatabaseField(foreign = true)
public Foo foo;

If you are up to date in versions, please let me know if you can change the test to get it to fail.