Hello,
I am building an application that will need to
dynamically build an SQL statement at run time, and
then populate the statement's fields from a map.
Sounds perfect for iBatis, right. That's what I
thought, but I don't think iBatis does quite what I
need. Normally iBatis can dynamically change it's SQL
but you need to know things like the number, name &
type of columns in advance when the SqlMap is created.
Unfortunately in my application, the SQL statement
that is built at runtime is completely dynamic. The
name of the columns, their data types and the number
of columns will only be known at run time. So what I
would like to do is dynamically instantiate an
SqlMapClient from a String, which contains the SqlMap
that is dynamically generated at run time. Then let
iBatis do the work of converting the map's values into
the correct data types and populating the SQL's field
values. It would be nice if the table name could be
passed as a property instead of in the map of data.
This looks like it would be possible with the
SqlMapClientBuilder, but I don't think that is going
to work. The problem is it wants to read an
SqlMapConfig, which then of course points to an SqlMap
file. However, the SqlMap file obviously won't exist
anywhere but as a string in ram, and it's not possible
(as far as I know) to directly load an SqlMap using
SqlMapClientBuilder, nor is it possible to load a
single "file" (string in ram) that is a combined
SqlMapConfig & SqlMap.
I could probably cobble something together using the
internal non-user exposed classes within iBatis, but
then if those classes change from one release to the
next I would have to make the appropriate changes to
my code, and I would prefer to use something that is
part of iBatis.
So, I would like to request a feature to make
dynamically building the SqlMap at runtime possible.
I suppose this could be done by developing a class
like SqlMapClientBuilder that accepted a String, and
didn't need an SqlMapConfig, just a SqlMap XML.
Alternately, a fixed API could be exposed to users to
manually construct a SqlClientMap.
Thoughts? Is there a better approach that works now?
Did I miss something obvious?
Thanks, and iBatis rocks!
Rob
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