FWD » Core Development » Database

The dmo_index.xml file (and DMOIndex class) originally was established as a list of DMOs needed to bootstrap Hibernate, but it has since evolved into a repository for miscellaneous, legacy database/schema information needed by the persistence runtime. As we embrace the use of annotations, much of this information is no longer needed in the dmo_index.xml file.

For the sake of maintenance of converted applications, I would like to minimize the use of this file, so that it once again is just a list of bootstrap DMOs. This will require analysis of all the current dependencies. Ideally, we would replace all this information with DMO annotations, so that there is one place to update when changing or adding tables, post-conversion.

This work has begun to some degree, in that we have added DMO annotations to support some runtime features already. But in the long term, we need a more directed approach, so that the code to use these annotations is well designed and not scattered across the persistence framework.