string decoupling and field names

Question

I have a number of domain/business objects, which when used in a hibernate criteria are referenced by the field name as a string, for example :

Criteria crit = session.createCriteria(User.class);
Order myOrdering = Order.desc("firstname");
crit.addOrder(myOrdering);

Where firstname is a field/property of User.class.

I could manually create an Enum and store all the strings in there; is there any other way that I am missing and requires less work(I'll probably forget to maintain the Enum).

Answer 1

I'm afraid there is no a good way to do that. Even if you decide to use reflections, you'll discover the problem only when the query will run.

But there is a little bit better solution how to discover the problem early: if you use the Named Queries (javax.persistence.NamedQueries) you'll get all your queries compiled as soon as your entities are processed by Hibernate, so basically it will happen during the server's start-up. So if some object was changed breaking the query, you'll know about it the next time you start the server and not when the query is actually run.

Hope it helps.