Add/Edit Entities in google app engine java local datastore

Question

Following are related to GAE/J local development setup:

1. How do i add/edit entities in local datastore (preferably using some UI)? _ah/admin allows only to view entities.

2. In the local JUnit test cases, how to access the same datastore data that my local web application writes to? I wrote my Test Cases in accordance with http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/tools/localunittesting.html but the test cases don't access the same data that the web application uses.

3. How to save local datastore data between clean-build (right now local_db.bin is written in the target directory which gets cleaned every now and then)

Stack being used :

• Google AppEngine for Java - (gae sdk 1.4/ java sdk 6),
• Netbeans-6.9.1,
• Maven-2 (maven-gae-plugin 0.7.3)

Answer 1

1. You can't currently edit entities in the Java local datastore viewer. It's in the todo list, though.
2. Your unit tests shouldn't rely on the contents of the datastore: unit tests are intended to be self-contained.
3. You can't do this, either, unless you make a backup of local_db.bin part of your build process. Again, you should ideally design your app with easy reloading of data in mind.

Answer 2

Now you can save/load entities using a command line client