How do I get CsvDozerBeanWriter to pull column headers from Dozer XML mapping files

Question

I'm writing a feature to produce CSV snapshots of screen data.

I need this to be data-driven. Thus I need to avoid hard-coding each snapshot in Java, but rather load it from a data source such as an XML file or a database. The data is contained in Java beans.

I'm using SuperCSV with the Dozer extension both at 2.1.0.

This combination seems perfect since I can code the mappings from the beans to the columns in Dozer XML mapping files.

This works well for the data, but I have not found a way to specify the strings to use for the CSV's column headers other than to hard-code them in Java as is done in all of the examples and test cases I've looked at. That is not data-driven.

Is there a way for me to code the column headers in the mapper file. Or even to extract them from the mapper file, construct a List and pass them to the writerHeader() method?

I think it would be OK to just use the bean property names as the headers, although ideal situation is that I am provided some additional meta-data notation in the XML's <Field> tag that specifies the header.

I'd have posted this on SourceForge, but I'm getting a 500 error there.

Answer 1

I'm a Super CSV developer. You're the first person I've heard of who's using CsvDozerBeanWriter with their own DozerBeanMapper - great to hear that feature is useful :)

So what's the goal of being 'data driven'? It sounds like you want your code to be really generic, so you can alter the CSV just by changing the XML. Is that right? Of course, you can't configure the cell processors dynamically...or are you trying to do that too!!??

I'd take a look at the MappingMetadata API of Dozer, which you can access by calling getMappingMetadata() on the DozerBeanMapper. I've never used it, but it looks like you could derive the column names this way (though you'd probably be limited to the field names).

Otherwise, you'll have to parse the XML file yourself (I'd probably use XPath). You'd have to do it this way if you want to use some other metadata in the XML for the column name.