Just as you can have JBoss create the database structure, you can also have automatic updates of this database structure. This even includes automatic creation of indexes.
In jbosscmp-jdbc.xml you can tell JBoss to alter the table structure if necessary. This is done using the following sections (other tags be added as needed)
<defaults> <create-table>true</create-table> <alter-table>true</alter-table> </defaults>
Note that you need the combination of create-table and alter-table to make sure that both added/altered fields are updated and new (link) tables are being created.
This will have the following effect :
new fields are created
fields which are no longer used are removed
string fields which are shorter than the declared length will have their length increased to the declared length (this is not supported by all databases).
Note that alter-table does not change the type of a column.
All work done by alter-table is logged at WARN level.
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There are variations in the SQL statements which need to be used for the alter table statements. Therefor this can be defined as part of the database specific type-mapping (in conf/standardjboss-cmp.xml). For example, these are the default templates, which are (amongst others) suitable for the Firebird database.
<add-column-template>ALTER TABLE ?1 ADD ?2 ?3</add-column-template> <alter-column-template>ALTER TABLE ?1 ALTER ?2 TYPE ?3</alter-column-template> <drop-column-template>ALTER TABLE ?1 DROP ?2</drop-column-template>
add-column-template has the following parameters
Table name
Column name
Column type
alter-column-template has the following parameters
Table name
Column name
Column type
drop-column-template has the following parameters
Table name
Column name
The SQL statements are configurable since 3.2.6RC1
There's a patch on http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBAS-1366 that solves the 'duplicate column' error while checking the differences between the entity bean and the table in the database.
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