Polymorphism

Polymorphism in Morphium

Morphium supports polymorphism. That means, you can store objects of different kind in one collection and process them with a single call. Please keep these things in mind when using polymorphsim in morphium:

• you need to make sure that all types are stored in the same collection. Usually you would do that by providing an own name provider
• all entities in the collection should have a common superclass. Otherwise there would be strange "ClassCastExceptions"
• when accessing the collection, you should always use the supertype. otherwise data might be lost. And, if storing an update, the type might change.

lets get in more detail about the last item. Imaginge you stored Several objects in one collection, all of those of type Person. Now you add an Employee, which is as subclass of person, to this collection. When you access the collection as Employee, all your persons will read into Employee objects - which means, this might break constraints or might even fail.

here is a testcase for morphium, which shows how polymorphism might be used:

package de.caluga.test.mongo.suite;

import de.caluga.morphium.Morphium;
import de.caluga.morphium.MorphiumSingleton;
import de.caluga.morphium.NameProvider;
import de.caluga.morphium.ObjectMapper;
import de.caluga.morphium.annotations.Entity;
import de.caluga.morphium.annotations.Id;
import de.caluga.morphium.annotations.caching.NoCache;
import org.bson.types.ObjectId;
import org.junit.Test;

import java.util.List;

/**
 * Created with IntelliJ IDEA.
 * User: stephan
 * Date: 27.11.13
 * Time: 08:39
 * Test polymorphism mechanism in Morphium
 */
public class PolymorphismTest extends MongoTest {
    @Test
    public void polymorphTest() throws Exception {
        MorphiumSingleton.get().dropCollection(PolyTest.class);
        OtherSubClass p = new OtherSubClass();
        p.setPoly("poly");
        p.setOther("other");
        MorphiumSingleton.get().store(p);

        SubClass sb = new SubClass();
        sb.setPoly("poly super");
        sb.setSub("sub");
        MorphiumSingleton.get().store(sb);

        assert (MorphiumSingleton.get().createQueryFor(PolyTest.class).countAll() == 2);
        List<PolyTest> lst = MorphiumSingleton.get().createQueryFor(PolyTest.class).asList();
        for (PolyTest tst : lst) {
            log.info("Class " + tst.getClass().toString());
        }
    }

    public static class PolyNameProvider implements NameProvider {

        @Override
        public String getCollectionName(Class<?> type, ObjectMapper om, boolean translateCamelCase, boolean useFQN, String specifiedName, Morphium morphium) {
            return "poly";
        }
    }

    @Entity(polymorph = true, nameProvider = PolyNameProvider.class)
    @NoCache
    public static abstract class PolyTest {
        private String poly;

        @Id
        private ObjectId id;

        public String getPoly() {
            return poly;
        }

        public void setPoly(String poly) {
            this.poly = poly;
        }
    }

    public static class SubClass extends PolyTest {
        private String sub;

        public String getSub() {
            return sub;
        }

        public void setSub(String sub) {
            this.sub = sub;
        }
    }

    public static class OtherSubClass extends PolyTest {
        private String other;

        public String getOther() {
            return other;
        }

        public void setOther(String o) {
            this.other = o;
        }
    }
}