Frequently Asked Questions
- What does this plugin do?
- What's so hard about JPA testing?
- Gee, that sounds like a lot of boilerplate.
- Why, almost of the kind that should be generated.
- So kind of like an annotation processor.
- That's a lot of class loading; isn't this thing slow?
- OK, how do I use it?
- Does this plugin have anything to do with Hibernate?
- Does this plugin interact with the database?
- What does this plugin do?
-
The jpa-maven-plugin helps make unit and integration testing of a JPA project easier.
- What's so hard about JPA testing?
-
Nothing, if you don't mind editing your persistence.xml in your src/test/resources/META-INF directory (you do have one, right?) every time you add or delete a new entity, mapped superclass, id class or embeddable class.
- Gee, that sounds like a lot of boilerplate.
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It is.
- Why, almost of the kind that should be generated.
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That's one of the things this plugin does: generate the boilerplate list of class names in your test persistence.xml.
- So kind of like an annotation processor.
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Yes, but an annotation processor at compile time inspects source code. This plugin inspects classes, and inspects the classes of not only your project, but its test-time dependencies.
- That's a lot of class loading; isn't this thing slow?
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No, because it uses the Scannotation library to inspect the bytecode of the classes very quickly.
- OK, how do I use it?
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Please see the "Generating elements in a persistence.xml file example" for an example of its most common usage. More detailed information is available on the Goals page.
- Does this plugin have anything to do with Hibernate?
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No. This plugin is JPA-provider agnostic.
- Does this plugin interact with the database?
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Not as of this writing. Currently, none of this plugin's goals interact with either the database or the JPA provider.