Code Nuggets

A friend just told me about a nifty little feature in commons-lang:

import org.apache.commons.lang.builder.ToStringBuilder;
import org.apache.commons.lang.builder.ToStringStyle;

public String toString(){
    return ToStringBuilder.reflectionToString(this, ToStringStyle.SIMPLE_STYLE);
}

 

What that does is spit out all the properties of your object when you call a toString on it.

 

Another little gem I have ended up using a lot is when I write test cases with spring.  When you extend the AbstractDependencyInjectionSpringContextTests object one of the methods you need to override is the protected String[] getConfigLocations() method.

Getting your spring context to load correctly is critical to getting your spring app to run and can cause a lot of head scratching and frustration here is a little trick to get it to load correctly - it is a bit hackish but in some scenarios it works well.

import java.io.File;

import org.springframework.test.AbstractDependencyInjectionSpringContextTests;

public class AbstractTestCase extends AbstractDependencyInjectionSpringContextTests {
    public final String RELATIVE_LOCATION = "src/test/resources";
    public final String FILE_NAME = "persistence_ioc.xml";
    @Override
    protected String[] getConfigLocations() {
        File aNewFile = new File("./");
        StringBuilder contextLocation =
            new StringBuilder(
                aNewFile.getAbsolutePath().substring(0,
                        (aNewFile.getAbsolutePath().length() -1)
                )
            );
        contextLocation.append(RELATIVE_LOCATION).append("/").append(FILE_NAME);
        File test = new File(contextLocation.toString());
        if (!test.exists()){
            System.out.println("!!! file doesn't exist at: " +
                    test.getAbsolutePath());
        }
        return new String[]{"File:" + contextLocation.toString()};
    }
}

Like I said a little bit hackish but effective nonetheless.

 

-Aaron