Package org.oreodata.metadata

This package contains classes that represent metadata in Oreo, objects that encapsulate information about data sources, record types, and fields.

See:
Description

Class Summary

BooleanField	A FieldDescriptor that describes a field with a boolean true/false value.
DataSourceMetadata	An object that provides metadata about how to instantiate an OreoDataSource object -- it bridges the W3C DOM with our DataSource descriptions in XML format.
DateField	A descriptor for a field that holds a date or timestamp (probably a misnomer, should be called TimeStampField)
EmailField	A trivial subclass of StringField for handling the validity checking email addresses.
Field	abstract base class for objects that represent the metadata relating to a record field.
ForeignKeyField	A subclass of Field that represents a foreign key field.
JoinMetadata	An implementation of the RecordDescriptor interface.
LocaleField	A Field subtype that indicates that this field represents an instance of java.util.Locale.
MetadataLoader
NumericalField	A descriptor for a field that holds a single numerical value.
RecordMetadata	An implementation of the RecordDescriptor interface.
StringField	Field metadata that represents a field with a string value.
TimeZoneField	A descriptor for a field that holds a time zone
TupleMetadata	An implementation of the RecordDescriptor interface.
URLField	Field descriptor that describes a field that must be a valid URL
XMLFieldHandler	A SAX Event handler that takes over when a parent handler realizes that we have a field within a record.
XMLRecordHandler	A SAX Event handler that takes over when a parent handler realizes that we have a record element.

Package org.oreodata.metadata Description

This package contains classes that represent metadata in Oreo, objects that encapsulate information about data sources, record types, and fields. Typically, you will not use these classes directly in your java code. You will specify them in an XML configuration file and the necessary initializations will happen behind the scenes in your application's startup phase. For more information on how to do the XML configuration, see these additional notes.

The class RecordMetadata is a concrete implementation of the interface RecordDescriptor which is the Oreo API for objects that represent record metadata. The class Field and its various subclasses are concrete implementations of the FieldDescriptor interface which represents field-level metadata.

The various Field subtypes, such as StringField and NumericalField are out-of-the box implementations that are most people will use directly. However, note that it is not terribly hard to write your own subclasses to represent whatever data categories there are in your application domain. To get a feel for how to do this, I would direct your attention to the source code of EmailField since this is an extremely simple subclass of StringField, basically a convenience for fields that represent an internet email address. I would anticipate that some people might write custom subclasses of NumericalField to represent money amounts in possibly different denominations.