Software n' stuff

Further to my previous post, I spent a bit of time today getting the ORMDroid project set up on Google Code (Edit: Moved to Github), including adding a bit of sample code to get you going with the library. I’m also working on extracting a simple sample project that will also go in the repository, which will serve as a proof of concept, a working example, and a functional testbed all in one.

Getting up and running with ORMDroid is really simple. Firstly, you need to add a single XML tag to your AndroidManifest.xml (it should be a child of the Application tag):

<meta-data
    android:name="ormdroid.database.name"
    android:value="your_database_name" />

Next, you need to initialize the framework somewhere. Application.onCreate() is the logical choice if you’re using a custom Application class (configured in your manifest – see Google’s JavaDocs if you want to go this route), but  you can happily call this from pretty much anywhere – even your activity’s onCreate() – since there’s actually no penalty for calling the initialize method multiple times.

ORMDroidApplication.initialize(someContext);

Side note: Currently, ORMDroidApplication is itself a subclass of android.app.Application, so you could go down the route of setting it directly as your application class, or subclassing it with your custom behaviour, and have the initialization handled transparently for you. However, this isn’t the recommended way, and it’s possible this facility will be removed in future versions.

With the framework initialized, you can start loading and saving your models! These are just plain Java POJOs that subclass the ORMDroid Entity class. If you’re happy with the default table and column names provided by the framework, these can be as simple as:

package com.example.myapp;

import com.roscopeco.ormdroid.Entity;

public class Person extends Entity {
  public int id;
  public String name;
  public String telephone;
}

Working with the Person class is now as simple as:

Person p = Entity.query(Person.class).where("id").eq("1").execute();
p.telephone = "555-1234";  // for example...
p.save();

And that’s it. No, really, it’s that simple. You don’t have to worry about setting up the database, ensuring tables are created, transaction management, or any of that other stuff. Of course, you can handle the database yourself if you really want to, but ORMDroid is more than happy to take care of it for you if you’ll let it.

The entity class in the example above will be stored in the following table:

CREATE TABLE comexamplemyappPerson (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT, name VARCHAR, phone VARCHAR);

If you aren’t happy with this default mapping, you can use the Table and Column annotations to customize things, e.g:

package com.example.myapp;

import com.roscopeco.ormdroid.Entity;
import com.roscopeco.ormdroid.Table;
import com.roscopeco.ormdroid.Column;

@Table(name="people")
public class Person extends Entity {
  @Column(name="person_id", primaryKey=true)
  public int id;

  @Column(name="fullname")
  public String name;

  public String telephone;
}

A couple of things to note here are that the primaryKey parameter is actually redundant, since id would be used as a primary key in the absence of another field that has primaryKey=true, and that, and that you don’t have to annotate all the columns – only those you want to change the default mapping for.

And that’s it. You’re up and running with ORMDroid! Obviously this example code is very simple, and misses out probably the most important point with using an ORM framework – relationships. You can play with this yourself though – create another entity class, and give it a Person field. By default, whenever you persist your new class the related Person will be persisted as well. One-to-one relationships are already supported, and it’s easy to add helper methods to support many relationships using the query facilities provided by Entity. We’ll take a detailed look at relationships at a later date (this post is already long enough), but for now take a look at the code and I guarantee you’ll pick it up in no time anyway.