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Hi all,

i need some hints on how to proceed to build my application.

I've an already existing data layer comprised of:
- domain model POJOs classes annotated with JPA annotation (plus some hibernate3 specifics)
- a generic DAO layer
- some components using the DAOs to implement higher level business intelligence.

I would like to integrate these in liferay but all the guides end up to use service.xml to define entities, tables and so on.

What i would do is to expose a new data source, the annotated POJOs classes and the DAOs as spring beans towards the portlet layer.

Till now i've done the following:

In the portal-ext.properties i've defined the new data source "myds"

file: /ext/ext-impl/portal-ext.properties
# jdbc.myds.driverClassName=org.postgresql.Driver
# jdbc.myds.url=jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/myds
# jdbc.myds.username=myds
# jdbc.myds.password=myds

In the file ext-spring.xml i've put the following beans definitions:

<bean id="mydsDataSource"
class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DriverManagerDataSource">
<property name="driverClassName">
<value>org.postgresql.Driver</value>
</property>
<property name="url">
<value>jdbc:postgresql://localhost/myds</value>
</property>
<property name="username">
<value>myds</value>
</property>
<property name="password">
<value>myds</value>
</property>
</bean>

<bean id="mydsNamingStrategy"
class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.FieldRetrievingFactoryBean">
<property name="staticField">
<value>org.hibernate.cfg.ImprovedNamingStrategy.INSTANCE</value>
</property>
</bean>

<bean id="mydsSessionFactory"
class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean">
<property name="namingStrategy">
<ref bean="mydsNamingStrategy" />
</property>
<property name="annotatedClasses">
<list>
<value>it.myds.datalayer.domainmodel.DSUser</value>
.... other annotated classes....
</list>
</property>
<property name="hibernateProperties">
<props>
<prop key="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.show_sql">true</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto">create</prop>
</props>
</property>
<property name="dataSource">
<ref bean="mydsDataSource" />
</property>
</bean>

I've put data model POJOs (those in ns "it.myds.datalayer.domainmodel.*") in ext-services/src.
I've also added some libraries to ext-lib/development:
• /ext/ext-lib/development/commons-lang-2.4.jar
• /ext/ext-lib/development/ejb3-persistence.jar
• /ext/ext-lib/development/hibernate-annotations.jar
• /ext/ext-lib/development/hibernate-core.jar
• /ext/ext-lib/development/hibernate-entitymanager.jar
• /ext/ext-lib/development/hibernate-validator.jar

I've build and redeployed ext and all went successfully at compile time.
(As a side note, do i'll need to put (eventually some of) these libs also in global or portal dirs to be accessed at runtime?)

Now before integrating DAOs, i would like to obtain "mydsSessionFactory" bean from a portlet to test the access to the new datasource. How i can refer to those beans from the portlet context?

The fact is that my data layer uses annotations to define a quite complex schema. This is the reason i choosed integration instead of migrating it towards service builder.
Is this the right way to proceed in order to add a pre-existing datalayer based on Hibernate annotations, not using Service Builder ?

Please, can you also comment on what i'm doing so if there is something done wrong i can restart doing things in right way ?

Sorry for such long mail but i wasn't able to find answers around.

Thank you all,
Luca