I played around with different implementations and here’s an excerpt of a very simple one using only groovy. I shows very much the power of groovy over java, when using dynamic typing.

public class GroovyIBatisDao extends SqlMapClientDaoSupport {

  def methodMapping = [
      // findAll must be before find
      “findAll” : “queryForList”,
      “find”    : “queryForObject”,
      “insert”  : “insert”,
      “update”  : “update”,
      “delete”  : “delete”
  ]
  
  Object invokeMethod(String method, Object arguments) {
    String useMethod = methodMapping.find{entry ->
        method.startsWith(entry.key)
    }.value

    getSqlMapClientTemplate().“${useMethod}”(method, arguments[0])
  }

}

Short, eh!? You can use it that way:

public class ExampleService {

  def dao;

  def doSomething(foo, bar) {
    def thing = dao.findThingByFoo foo
    def some = dao.findAllThingsByBar bar
    thing.doItWith some
    dao.updateThing thing
  }

}

You only have to implement the three statements “findThingByFoo”, “findAllThingsByBar” and “updateThing” in the SQL Map and add a little configuration to your Spring context. You could even define your own “methodMapping” in the configuration.

As mentioned this is an trivial implementation. I added also added support for SQL Map namespaces. For performance reasons it’s good to implement missingMethod instead of invokeMethod and to create a new method for the DAO object. The main overhead will only be executed once per dynamic method. Also the mapping could be better - perhaps based on regular expressions - and we could support more SQL Map features. Perhaps more next week.