Entities

Learn the basics of modeling ORM entities

A persistent entity is a boxlang class that is marked as a database entity via the persistent annotation upon the class definition:

class persistent="true"{

}

By default, the entity name will be the boxlang class file name - minus the file extension, of course. We can modify the entity name via the entityname annotation:

class persistent="true" entityname="Author" {

}

And the table name via the table annotation:

class persistent="true" entityname="Author" table="authors" {

}

Here's the full list of available annotations for a persistent class:

Attribute	Type	Default	Description
persistent	boolean	false	Mark this class as an ORM entity
entityname	string		Set a custom entity name which is different than the boxlang class name
table	string		Specify the database table name
schema	string		Specify the database schema name.
catalog	string		Specify the database catalog name.
dynamicinsert			Specifies whether INSERT SQL is to be generated at runtime. Only those columns whose values are not null are included in the SQL.
dynamicinsert	boolean	false	Specifies whether INSERT SQL is to be generated at runtime. Only those columns whose values are not null are included in the SQL.
dynamicupdate	boolean	false	Specifies whether UPDATE SQL is to be generated at runtime. Only those columns whose values are not null are included in the SQL.
readonly	boolean	false	Specify whether table is readonly or not
selectbeforeupdate	boolean		Specify whether Hibernate should never perform an SQL UPDATE unless it is certain that an object is actually modified. In cases when a transient object is associated with a new session using update(), Hibernate performs an extra SQL SELECT to determine if an UPDATE is actually required.
optimisticlock	string		Determines the locking strategy. It can be any one of:all,dirty,version,none
batchsize	integer		An integer value that specifies the number of records to be retrieved at a single instance.
lazy	boolean	true	Whether loading is to be done lazily or not.
rowid	string		Specify the row id
discriminatorColumn	string		Use this attribute to define the discriminator column to be used in inheritance mapping
discriminatorValue	string		Use this attribute to define the discriminator value to be used in inheritance mapping
joinColumn	string		Define a join column for inheritance mapping
embedded	boolean		Marks class as embedded, used when a class has an embedded object which also needs to be persisted along with the parent's data
cacheUse	string		Specify the caching strategy to be used for caching this entity's data in the secondary cache:read-only
cacheName	string		Specify the name of the secondary cache
saveMapping	boolean	false	Specifies whether the generated Hibernate mapping file has to be saved to disk. If you set the value to true, the Hibernate mapping XML file is saved as {class name}.hbm.xml in the same directory as the boxlang class.
datasource	string		Name a specific datasource to persist this entity to.