What are the possible solutions for stripping the trailing whitespace when mapping char
fields in a legacy database?
I see the following options:
- Calling
.trim()
at the point of use (controller, view, etc)
- Override property accessors to return
.trim()
- Using a Hibernate UserType to trim the whitespace
I'm leaning toward overriding the property accessor so that the domain properties remain consistent throughout the application.
I had a similar problem and I could not alter the legacy data. I ended up overriding the accessor for the sake of transparency to my fellow developers. I would recommend using a transient field so you don't have to trim the String on every call. However; if you can just clean up the data in the table, create a view, or transfer to a new table I would do that instead.
I use a globally mapped Hibernate UserType and it works great (implementation based on http://www.hibernate.org/388.html, but updated for breaking changes to the UserType
interface):
package company
import org.hibernate.Hibernate
import org.hibernate.usertype.UserType
import java.sql.PreparedStatement
import java.sql.ResultSet
import java.sql.SQLException
import java.sql.Types
/**
* Map CHAR(x) types to String: trim when getting and setting the CHAR(x)
* based on www.hibernate.org/388.html
*/
public class TrimmedString implements UserType {
public TrimmedString() {
}
public int[] sqlTypes() {
return [Types.CHAR] as int[];
}
@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
public Class returnedClass() {
return String.class;
}
public boolean equals(Object x, Object y) {
return (x == y) || (x != null && y != null && (x.equals(y)));
}
public Object nullSafeGet(ResultSet inResultSet, String[] names, Object o) throws SQLException {
String val = (String) Hibernate.STRING.nullSafeGet(inResultSet, names[0]);
return val == null ? null : val.trim();
}
public void nullSafeSet(PreparedStatement inPreparedStatement, Object o, int i) throws SQLException {
String val = (String) o;
inPreparedStatement.setString(i, val);
}
public Object deepCopy(Object o) {
if (o == null) {
return null;
}
return new String(((String) o));
}
public boolean isMutable() {
return false;
}
public Object assemble(Serializable cached, Object owner) {
return cached;
}
public Serializable disassemble(Object value) {
return (Serializable) value;
}
public Object replace(Object original, Object target, Object owner) {
return original;
}
public int hashCode(Object x) {
return x.hashCode();
}
}
global mapping in Groovy.config:
grails.gorm.default.mapping = {
'user-type'(type: company.TrimmedString, class: String) //map Char(x) columns mapped to string fields as trimmed string
}