Scooter Framework

Active Record Pattern

Active Record is a design pattern first proposed by Martin Fowler. According to Martin Fowler, an active record object represents a row in a database table. Contrary to J2EE's Value Object pattern which is an object having only data fields but no behavior, and to the popular DAO pattern which only has data access behavior but no data, the Active Record pattern describes a rich object which has both data fields and data access behavior.

Scooter Framework's ActiveRecord class is an implementation of Active Record pattern. All domain objects, if they want to take advantage of functionalities of ActiveRecord, must become a subclass of this class.

For example, a Post class which represents a blog post record in database, can be implemented as follows:

public class Post extends ActiveRecord {
}

Even though this class only has one code line (omitting import and package statement lines), it is already very powerful as it inherits many methods from its super class. It also has knowledge of posts table meta data information such as name and properties of all columns including primary key column(s).

Click here for some examples of using ActiveRecord.

By default, the Post class in singular form above maps to a table named posts in plural form in database. This can be changed by the use.plural.table.name property in the database.poperties file. There are some other properties in that file related to table naming conventions. For example, if names of all your tables start with a prefix of "CRM_", you simply use the global.table.naming.prefix property.