Inferno DAO User Guide

Inferno DAO is a command-line tool that reverse engineers database schemas and then generates Java source code for popular persistence frameworks, such as Spring Data JPA and Hibernate ORM.

1. Installation

Inferno DAO is available as a zip file and a tarball from the download page. Once extracted, the Inferno DAO command-line interface can be launched by running the included shell script.

Java Runtime Environment 8 or later must be available on the path. OpenJDK 8 is recommended.

1.1 Installing on Windows

Simply double click the zip file to extract the files. It is recommended that the inferno folder is moved to C:\Program Files. Add the bin/inferno.bat batch file to your path by modifying the PATH environment variable.

1.2 Installing on Mac & Linux

Use the tar utility to extract the contents of the tarball and then move the inferno folder to an appropriate directory and add the bin/infero.sh bash script to the path.

tar xf inferno.tar

2. Defining a Data Source

Before a database schema can be imported, we need to define a JDBC data source to connect to.

2.1 Example Data Source Definition

The examples directory contains some example data source definitions that can be used as a starting point. Here is an example data source definition for a local MySQL instance.

url: "jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306"
connection-properties:
  - key: "user"
    value: "root"
  - key: "password"
    value: "secret"

3. Importing a Schema

Using the data source defined in the previous section, we can now run the Inferno command-line interface and import a schema.

3.1 List Available Catalogs and Schemas

Some JDBC data sources use the term catalog and others use the term schema to represent a database schema. For example, MySQL uses catalog and Postgres uses schema to represent schemas.

To determine whether your database uses the term catalog or schema, use the list-catalogs and list-schemas commands.

Run the following command to show a list of available catalogs in the data source.

./bin/inferno list-catalogs -d mysql-datasource.yaml

This should show output similar to this example:

Data source contains 5 catalogs:
	- inferno_openemr
	- information_schema
	- mysql
	- performance_schema
	- sys

Run the following command to show a list of available schemas in the data source.

./bin/inferno list-schemas -d postgres-datasource.yaml

This should show output similar to this example:

Data source contains 4 schemas:
	- inferno
	- information_schema
	- pg_catalog
	- public

3.2 Importing the Schema

Use the import command to import a schema. Be sure to use the correct values for catalog (-c) and schema (-s) as determined in the previous step.

Importing a MySQL catalog:

./bin/inferno import -d mysql-datasource.yaml -c openemr -o openemr.yaml

Importing a Postgres schema:

./bin/inferno import -d postgres-datasource.yaml -s openemr -o openemr.yaml

This should show output similar to this example:

Importing schema 'openemr' from mysql-datasource.yaml ...
Imported 200 tables from schema 'openemr'

The generated schema file simply contains meta-data about each table in the schema. Here is an example.

name: "openemr"
tables:
- name: "addresses"
  columns:
  - name: "id"
    jdbcType: "INTEGER"
    columnSize: 10
    decimalDigits: 0
    nullable: false
    autoIncrement: false
  - name: "line1"
    jdbcType: "VARCHAR"
    columnSize: 255
    decimalDigits: 0
    nullable: true
    autoIncrement: false

4. Generating Code

Now that we have a schema we can generate code using one of the provided code generators. The general syntax for generating code is as follows:

./bin/inferno generate -g GENERATOR \
  -s openemr.yaml \
  -p com.mycompany.dao \
  -d src/generated/java

The currently supported values for GENERATOR are java-dto, spring-data-jpa, and hibernate.

4.1 Generating Java DTO Source Code

./bin/inferno generate -g java-dto \
  -s openemr.yaml \
  -p com.mycompany.dao \
  -d src/generated/java

4.2 Generating Spring Data JPA Source Code

./bin/inferno generate -g spring-data-jpa \
  -s openemr.yaml \
  -p com.mycompany.dao \
  -d src/generated/java

4.2 Generating Hibernate ORM Source Code

The Hibernate code generator has two versions. Use hibernate-classic to generate a Hibernate Mapping XML file for each table, or hibernate to generate Java code using annotations (recommended).

./bin/inferno generate -g hibernate \
  -s openemr.yaml \
  -p com.mycompany.dao \
  -d src/generated/java