I'm borrowing the "slice" meaning from C++.
Let's say I hava a simple POJO that's persisted via Hibernate:
class Person {
private long id;
private String name;
...
// getters and setters here
...
}
Now, when I retrieve an object from the database I know it was "instrumented" by Hibernate (its real class is a Person-derived generated automatically). I want to convert it back to a "plain" person object. Tnat would be used, for instance, to submit the object to XStream and have the result containing only what Person contains.
I could do it by defining a copy constructor, but I don't want to have the hassle of having to write copy constructors for every ORM class (not to mention the violation of DRY principle).
So I was wondering if
a) is there already a Java lib that does it? b) If not, would it be practical to write one using reflection?
In case of (b), any recomendations/guidelines/code skeletons would be appreciated.
The bean mapping library Dozer does an excellent job of this and is dead simple to use.
Simply map an instance of the bean returned by Hibernate to it's own class:
Person person = session.load(...);
BeanMapper mapper = ...;
Person cleanPerson = mapper.map(person, Person.class);
voila, no more Hibernate proxies or lazy-loaded collections!