Using Adempiere's Data Dictionary

One of the most powerful aspects of Adempiere (and, by virtue, Compiere), is its robust and comprehensive data dictionary. Virtually the entire application is defined within it, thus making modifications and enhancements a very straightforward (in many respects, it's a true model-driven architecture, MDA).

As part of the Web Services initiative I'm working on, it's necessary to dynamically generate the XML schemas for those objects that are required to be exposed as web services. This can be done easily by using the org.compiere.model.MTable and org.compiere.model.MColumn classes. The combination of these provides you the properties ofa particular Adempiere/Compiere object, including such relevant information as: column name; column type, column length; default values; and reference information.

Let's take a specific example -- the C_Invoice object, and determine it's columns and associated properties. Here's some Java pseudo-code that illustrates how this can be done:

MTable mTable = MTable.get(Env.getCtx(), "C_Invoice");
MColumn mcolumn[] = mTable.getColumns(true);

for (int i = 0; i < mcolumn.length; i++) {

   System.out.println("Column is: " + mcolumn[i].getName())
   System.out.println(" Desc is: " + mcolumn[i].getName());
   System.out.println(" Length is: " + mcolumn[i].getName());
}

As you can see, it's very easy to interrogate what fields and properties belong to a given object, and it's completely dynamic, driven by the current configuration specified in the data dictionary.

For the web services initiative, I'm using this data to dynamically generate the WSDL schema.

jeff

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