To make OJB proper work it needs information about the used
database connections, sequence managers,
connection pool configurations (hence
called connection metadata) and information about
the persistent objects and their associations (hence called (persistent)
object metadata) used in the supported API's.
The connection metadata are completely decoupled from the persistent object
metadata.
In OJB there are several ways to make metadata available:
- using xml configuration files parsed at start up
- set metadata at runtime by handling metadata 'container' classes
- parse additional xml configuration files and merge at runtime
All classes belonging to metadata handling can be find under
org.apache.ojb.broker.metadata
-package.
The main class
for metadata handling and entry point for metadata manipulation at
runtime is org.apache.ojb.broker.metadata.MetadataManager
.