Currently our Cayenne app has the database field size and types stored in the configuration files that ship with the application. They were generated in the Cayenne modeler.
Is there any reason, in principle, why we couldn't read that info during startup of the application? IOW, reengineering on the fly. - It would allow database maintainers to adjust field sizes without us updating Cayenne. We have a lot of variants of the database schema in the field and changing size of a NVARCHAR or changing an NVARCHAR to a CLOB would be typical operations. - Adding a field to a database table could be done from the database GUI - We would be able to cope easily with the absence or presence of optional table fields The Cayenne modeler would still be useful to choose Java representation of the fields regardless of their type(CLOB, NVARCHAR, CHAR, etc.). We have some database adapters that don't do robust reengineering (FoxBase, MS Access, shudder!), but presumably we could programatically adapt the Cayenne database schema for those/stick with a default one which we do today. -- Øyvind Harboe http://www.zylin.com - eCos ARM & FPGA developer kit
