How to instantiate generated builder for EntityView?

[david-kubecka]

According to docs, to obtain builder for a View one should call EntityViewManager.createBuilder(View.class). That gives just a generic builder of the type EntityViewBuilder, though. The generated static builder with view-specific accessors is of the type EntityViewBuilderBase. How to get an instance of that?

[david-kubecka]

I see now that in the runtime EntityViewManager.createBuilder indeed returns a view-specific builder, e.g. CatViewBuilder which is an implementation of EntityViewBuilderBase. There must be some forced casting, though, because createBuilder returns EntityViewBuilder which has the build but none of the view-specific getters/setters so obviously they can't be used in the source code.

[beikov]

This is the way to do it, though I'd suggest you to use new CatViewBuilder.Init(Collections.emptyMap()) instead. Adding an additional constructor there is probably a good idea.

The strength of the builder is that it has special methods for every attribute getName/setName/withName. The methods of the generic builder only have generic get(..)/set(..)/with(..) methods and you always need to pass the attribute name or a static metamodel reference. The generated builders are independent of the EntityViewManager because their mainly intended usage area is when you don't have a database and hence no EntityViewManager available i.e. during unit tests.

If it is then is there any way how to achieve that generically, e.g. by passing the view type to EntityViewManager.createBuilder?

Sure. You do it generically, like this:

var catView = entityViewManager.createBuilder(CatView.class).with(CatView_.name, "some name").build();

or stringly typed:

var catView = entityViewManager.createBuilder(CatView.class).with("name", "some name").build();

[david-kubecka]

Yes, my intention is to use the builder mainly in unit tests so will use the CatViewBuilder.Init way, possibly with some convenience wrapper ;-)

[beikov]

What kind of convenience wrapper would be needed here? The intent of the class is for you not to have to code anything in addition.

[david-kubecka]

It's just my minimalistic way of thinking :-) I would create an extension function so that I can do e.g.

CatViewBuilder.of { name = "some name" }

I believe this can be done in a generic way. I could paste here the code once I'm ready with that (not the highest priority right now, though).

[beikov]

That's a nice improvement. If it's possible for me to generate anything in addition that allows you to use it this way, I'm open to adding that.