Dynamic Entities in JPA

[Lysander Poulsen]

Hi All!
First of all, thanks for a great forum. I have learned a lot in here, so now I thought I would ask a question of my own:

Is it in some way possible to create an entity at runtime to hold the result from a given query, in JPA? I am doing a webcrawling project, where I retrieve data and put it into some tables. The tables will have various sizes and number of columns, so I am a little stuck on how to map these differing tables to entities. I do not know the size of the table or the number of rows, before the query has been executed.

Thank you in advance for helping. Feel free to ask questions, if I have not been clear

[Scott Selikoff]

I'm confused why you mean by 'dynamic entities'. If you define a database structure, populate it with records from a web crawler, you can then run queries on it whether or not you knew the data ahead of time.

[Lysander Poulsen]

Ah yes, I see I was not clear. I do NOT define the database structure ahead of time. My webcrawler defines the tables it needs, and then puts data in them. Therefore, I do not know the structure of the tables. I only have the table names.

[Scott Selikoff]

It's hard for me to imagine a web crawler capable of defining the database structure dynamically. Usually (good) database structure requires the care of skilled DBA or programmer. I know I'm a little off-topic, but are you sure you really want to construct it dynamically? It seems like a risky thing to me.

[Lysander Poulsen]

Well in this case, the webcrawler is defining the database tables, or at least the ones it uses to store data in. So that is a requirement. Have you got any ideas about how to create the dynamic entities?

[Tim Holloway]

The main problem I see is using JPA. JPA is fundamentally based on having a predefined record structure, which means that at least one table in your database would presumably be fixed in format at all times.

You can construct classes completely dynamically - in fact JPA commonly re-engineers classes at runtime to add the extra persistency fields it needs. However that's not a task for the faint of heart.

[Lysander Poulsen]

Well we found another way of doing it, which does not use JPA, but thank you all for your quick answers