Lessons learned Seam 2.2 project

Quick post with some bullet points of lessons learned during my last (and first) Seam project:

• Seam 2.2
• Hibernate 3.3.1
• JEE 5
• EJB 3.0
• JSF 1.2
• Richfaces 3.3
• JBoss 5.1
• Drools 5
• SQLServer 2008
• MySql 5.x
• TestNG
• Hudson

Seam
- To have a navigation for a method with a parameter like exportSelected(String value): see Seam navigation based on a function with parameters
- If your Seam app keeps re-deploying (restarting) when using JBoss within Eclipse: delete all files that end with 'dia' in your WEB-INF dir. See: Seam keeps redeploying For example, I modified pages.xml, which apparently created a pagesdia (or similar) file... after removing that one, it worked fine again.

Hibernate
- To see which validator fails on a persist():

try { entityManager.persist(verbinding); } catch (InvalidStateException e) { for (InvalidValue invalidValue : e.getInvalidValues()) { System.err.println("--------------> create(): exception Instance " + "of bean class: " + invalidValue.getBeanClass().getSimpleName() + " has an invalid property: " + invalidValue.getPropertyName() + " with message: " + invalidValue.getMessage()); } throw new RuntimeException(e); }

MySql
- To see data in better format in MySQL: show engine innodb status\G (so add the \G to a query)

Hibernate/JPA
- NamedQueries are loaded and parsed at startup time, so that's an advantage above em.createQuery() which are only parsed and evaluated at runtime. So with NamedQueries you get the errors sooner.

Drools
To solve this error in Drools decision table .XLS spreadsheet:

[testng] DEBUG [test.service.drools.DroolsHandling] getKnowledgeBase: getting path info from settings service [testng] DEBUG [test.service.drools.DroolsHandling] getting test.service.drools.DroolsHandling ruletable file: HandlingModelTest.xls [testng] DEBUG [test.service.drools.DroolsHandling] getKnowledgeBase: Trying to open a File [testng] WARN [jxl.read.biff.NameRecord] Cannot read name ranges for Excel_BuiltIn__FilterDatabase_1 - setting to empty [testng] WARN [test.service.drools.DroolsHandling] There are errors in the decision table file [testng] WARN [test.service.drools.DroolsHandling] Decision table error: message=[ERR 102] Line 9:16 mismatched input '"DroolsHandling6"' expecting ']' in rule "DroolsData_12" in pattern stringDataset [testng] WARN [test.service.drools.DroolsHandling] line: 9 [testng] WARN [test.service.drools.DroolsHandling] Decision table error: message=[ERR 102] Line 9:35 mismatched input '"Prefab"' expecting ']' in rule "DroolsData_12" in pattern stringDataset [testng] WARN [test.service.drools.DroolsHandling] line: 9 [testng] WARN [test.service.drools.DroolsHandling] Decision table error: message=[ERR 102] Line 22:16 mismatched input '"DroolsHandling6"' expecting ']' in rule "DroolsData_12" in rule "DroolsData_13" in pattern stringDataset [testng] WARN [test.service.drools.DroolsHandling] line: 22

Make sure your definition has all the cells merged that contain a condition! For example, check the red arrow pointing at the border of the cells between G9 and H9.

The last cell for the condition Prefab is not merged (i.e one cell) with all the other conditions. Here's now how it should be: see again the red arrow, there's no cell separation anymore, all condition columns are now merged into 1 cell.

- A space in a condition in a decision spreadsheet can cause a non-match! E.g GATE VALVE is not matched. Fixed it by always replacing a ' ' with an '_'.