If you are among the numerous past xbox owners burnt by the infamous RROD and were holding out to replace the box with the new re-designed XBox 360 S, chances are, you have a lot of content on your old xbox which you want to transfer to you new shiny xbox.

Ideally, you should have been able to just connect your old xbox the new one and transfer your content, but that requires an official “Xbox 360 hard drive data migration transfer kit” (seriously, that’s the full name)… Microsoft being greedy as always, doesn’t include this cable in the new Xbox and wants you to pay $15 + shipping for it.. not a bad price, but considering you only need it once and that is because of Microsoft’s decision to change the HDD design in the new console (for good reasons) and having just forked out a good $300 on the new console, it is ridiculous to pay that kind of money to MS again.. so if you are still with me, not all is gloomy.. read on for a couple of free solutions…

First, either of the two solutions I am going to talk about here will require that you have access to a USB thumb drive. In case your mind is still set on the data transfer kit and are thinking of contact xbox support to see if they can send you a free one (like they used to last year), take my advise and don’t even bother… I was on phone for over an hour talking to level 1, then level 2 and then finally the top level, level 3 support and all I got was a lame advise to go and try in a B&M Store to see if they will let me use their display xbox to hook up my HDD…

If you are still reading, then here’s the simpler approach of the two… do you have a friend or neighbor who would let you use their original model xbox? If so, then just take your HDD and a USB thumb drive and connect them both to their xbox, and then in system settings –> storage, you’ll see the options to transfer the content for the hdd to thumb drive… if you don’t have the options in there, make sure you update the system software on the xbox…. once you are done transferring content to the usb drive, just connect that usb drive to your new XBox 360 S and do the reverse… depending on the size of your content and the thumb drive, you might have to repeat until you transfer all your content… btw, don’t bother about game installs, you install them again and content you bought on xbox live can be re-downloaded… Also, don’t forget to transfer the licenses to your new xbox. Visit the following site for instructions:http://www.xbox.com/en-us/support/systemuse/xbox360/licensemigration

Ok, you are still with me.. hmm, so that option 1 wasn’t an option for you… well you are not alone.. that was the case with me too. So here’s the option 2. Not as easy or straight forward as Option 1 or ideal solution, but it works and it doesn’t cost you a dime. Here’s how it goes… btw, if you are not good at or comfortable with taking things apart and putting them back again, this might not a wise solution for you. You have been warned!
Even though new Xbox is using another proprietary HDD format (at least from the looks of it), it is actually a step closer to using the standard drives than the old one did.. the new slick looking HDD cartridge is just a casing for the standard 2.5″ SATA drive like the one used in the old HDD case, but this time, the connectors are the standard sata connectors, which is the key here… So all you have to do is to pop open the HDD from your old xbox HDD case. Not sure of how to do it? Just carefully follow these instructions:  http://www.xbox-scene.com/tutorials-xbox360/open-xbox360-hdd-drive.php
Now that you have the standard 2.5″ SATA HDD from your old xbox, just pull the HDD cartridge from the bottom (or right side, depends on how you place you xbox) of the new Xbox 360 S and very carefully try to insert the old HDD into the slot. Take your time and make sure you are seeing the SATA connectors inside the new xbox and you have aligned the pins on HDD with the slot in the xbox, and gently press it into place. Again, be very careful here, you don’t want to break your brand new xbox trying to save your 20 bucks….

Ok, so you did it… you have your old HDD in the new xbox.. just power on the new console and it should just work with your old hdd like it was it’s original drive… ignore any alerts you see about the license or any thing and head on straight to the system settings –> storage and plug in the usb drive and transfer all your content to the usb drive. Once done, power off the console and unplug it and carefully remove the loose HDD from the bottom. You may have to use a pliers if you can’t get the grip to hold it with your fingers, but please be gentle. then you just insert the new cartridge in place and transfer content from the USB drive to the new HDD… That’s it really… you did it. Now go enjoy… and maybe join me on live. You’ll most like see coolpal playing MW2, he could use your help kicking some ass….

pal

Within 24 hours of apple releasing the Gold Master (final) version of iOS 4 (new name for iPhone OS 4), the hacker community, or in this case, just one guy (or gal?) has released patches to the Pwnage Tool 3.1.5 to support this new OS… and naturally I had to try it out

I followed the instructions posted on redmondpie.com here: http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-jailbreak-ios-4.0-with-pwnagetool/ which were pretty clear and precise, but due to a couple of mistakes in the instructions posted there, Cydia wasn’t working, but otherwise everything else was good and my base-band was still intact. However, after some searching around I found the problems that caused the cydia failure and tried to correct them and succeeded. Here I am posting a concise  how-to for anyone interested.

Warning: This stuff might turn your beloved iPhone into an expensive paper weight if things go wrong, and this method doesn’t work on most iPhones, so please don’t attempt this if you have never done this before and haven’t heard most of the stuff stated here. In case you are going to follow these steps, please proceed only after you read thru the entire instructions.

These instructions work only on iPhone 3Gs with 5.11.07 or earlier base-band and has already been jail broken by anything other than spirit jail break!!! Also, this is only a jail break, not unlock, so don’t attempt this if you rely on a incompatible carrier’s SIM.

Now that you have been warned, I assume you are a brave soul or just curious.. either way, here’s how it goes… First, here’s the list of things you’ll need to proceed.

1. Download Pwnage Tool 3.1.5 from here or here or just Google it.
2. Download the new firmware bundle for Pwnage tool by msft.guy from here
3. Download the updated Cydia files from here (data.tar)
4. Get your iOS 4 GM build that you got at WWDC along with iTunes 9.2 beta

Now it’s best to copy all the files to a folder or some place like desktop so it’s easy to manage. Also, for item 4, if you aren’t fortunate enough to be @ WWDC, you could ask your friends online.. Google’ll do

Now here’re the steps.. pay close attention to each.

Step 1: Mount the .dmg you got from step 1 and copy the “PwnageTool” to your folder of choice or desktop (I’ll assume desktop from now on).

Step 2: Extract the file from item 2 and rename the file to “iPhone2,1_4.0_8A293.bundle” (renaming might not be necessary, but I did it anyway). Now right-click the PwnageTool file on desktop and choose “Show Package Contents”, then browse to “Contents\Resources\FirmwareBundles\” and place the .bundle file there.

Step 3: From the same finder window, you can navigate to “Contents/Resources/CustomPackages/” then right-click CydiaInstaller.bundle and choose show package contents and browse to the “files” folder. Now copy the data.tar file (item 3) into the files folder.

Step 4: Open a terminal window and browse to the files folder in step 3. Yoy can type “cd ” then drag the files folder into the terminal. From files folder issue the following command.. “tax xvPf data.tar”. Pay attention to the upper case ‘P’.

Step 5: You are almost there.. well, actually there … now just launch the update PwnageTool app and follow the instructions.. it’s the usual process from here.. create the custom firmware like you always do..

Step 6: Launch itunes 9.2 and use chose restore while pressing left ‘alt’ key and choose the custom firmware to restore…. that’s it. You should be good, hopefully!

The changes I made to the instructions on redmondpie.com is in step 2 and step 3. I now have iOS 4 with Cydia working, but my favorite MyWi doesn’t work and it is even crashing the SpringBoard, so I had to uninstall it. SBSettings doesn’t seem to work either. I am still playing around with it, but the os itself seems to be fast and stable.

Hope it helps someone….
Pal

I am a sucker for new software, especially when it’s free. I briefly tried the Moblin 2 when Intel released the first beta last year and liked the UI and the way it worked on the tiny netbook screen. Moblin, short for Mobile Linux, was supposedly built with netbooks and nettops in mind and seemed pretty and fun but thou basic functionality all worked right out of the box, but a lot of hardware was still not working at the time and I quickly forgot about it… well, almost forgot.. until Meego 1.0 was released.

Meego is the combination of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo projects, tho I am still not sure how they came up with the name ‘Meego’. Meego is aimed at providing a fast and trendy OS to low powered internet devices like netbooks, MIDs, connected TVs and even car Infotainment, but as of this posting only netbook version was officially released. There were two versions of the release, one which requires you to accept Google’s EULA. Downloading and installing Meego was a breeze like most other linux distros these days, but should you need assistance, Meego has a pretty straight forward wiki post here: http://meego.com/devices/netbook/installing-meego-your-netbook ..In my case, I prepared a bootable thumb drive with the Meego disk image on Mac using bit copy and booted off the thumb drive on Samsung NC10.

I haven’t completely installed Meego to the HDD yet as I already have Windows 7, XP and Ubuntu NR installed and to install Meego, I’ll have to replace one of the existing OS so I wanted to try it out some more to see if It will actually replace any of these on my netbook. So far, It’s been running extremely well from the thumb drive, and here are my initial (or first) impressions..

• It looks almost exactly like Moblin 2.0… at least that’s how I remember Moblin to be
• Most of the hardware was working out of the box including special keys like volume up/down, but the brightness adjustments don’t work yet
• The UI is pretty slick and I think there are a few enhancements I noticed like auto hiding dock, zones etc.,
• It synced well with my google account for email, calendar, contacts etc., and also integrates well with twitter
• The included Chrome browser is pretty fast even with multiple tabs open
• Best of all, the whole UI feels right at home on the tiny (by laptop standards) 10″ screen, and is a real pleasure to use

I am really liking the way these linux projects are evolving and that can only mean one thing… awesome things are on the horizon.. imagine Microsoft trying to 1 up Meego.. not like windows 7 is bad on netbooks, but clearly it’s not meant for netbooks and tiny internet devices.. overall, my first impressions of Meego are really positive. Now get these things on car Infotainments already… those are really lagging behind on technology curve.

pal

Here are some more screenshots of Meego on NC10.

Well, like anybody else (or almost anybody else), I googled for the behavior hoping to find a solution as I thought it must be a pretty common thing and a lot of people already faced and fixed this issue, but to my surprise, I haven’t found a single result which helped me.. then again, it could be that I am sucking at my google skills lately. So anyway, after a few such encounters, I was determined to solve this problem. I also had google app installed on the phone, and noticed that the search results in the app were working just fine (I configured the google app to open results in the app itself instead of launching safari) and it was just the safari browser that was having this problem. When I see this error page, I noticed the URL was pretty long which was pointing to m.google.com with query parameters having the info to forward the request to the appropriate URL which seemed right to me, so I knew the browser was trying to reach the correct URL but for some reason the m.google.com was just responding with 404.

The settings screen for safari

Then it occurred to me, stop thinking like a geek web developer and think like a common tech aware person… so, I headed to the settings app and went on to the safari settings (see pic), and tried the “Clear History” and “Clear Cookies”. Didn’t want to clear cache as gmail had quite a bit of data cached and didn’t want clear it unless absolutely necessary. And that’s it, it solved the issue …. but I think “Clear Cookies” is what probably did it. So there it is folks, if you ever face the same problem, try that. Or if you know of a better solution or have more knowledge of why this happens in the first place, please let me know in the comments.

So, the other day, apple released this new point update to the OS.. the iPhone OS 3.1.3, which according to the original release notes would fix that strange battery phenomenon I described above (no big deal for me). But to the jailbreaking community, this was apple’s ploy to flush out any new holes so they can fix them for the big 4.0 update. That really could be the reason, but the tech support told me that the update was specifically designed to fix the dropping calls on 3Gs devices.. hard to believe, I know, but I wanted to give it a try so bad, but didn’t want to loose my jailbreak in the process. So after careful analysis, I figured that the new Pwnage tool (v 3.15) would help me, even though I have the 5.11.07 version of base band since my iboot is still the old 359.3. So, I went ahead and bit the update using the above mentioned pwnage tool and here are some of my experiences which could help others out there…

1. Pwnage tool stuck in never ending “searching for firmware” stage and clicking on “browse for ipsw” doesn’t do anything.
   Solution: This apparently is a known bug (a bug in Mac OS ?). Demount any non mac volumes (specifically NTFS volumes) and try again.
2. After you are done with Pwnage tool, it instructs you to put your phone in DFU mode and restore the patched rom from iTunes, but iTunes fails to restore with an error 1016?
   Solution: I just had to restore in normal mode. Get your phone out of DFU mode by pressing and holding Home and Power buttoms until you see the apple logo (or pineapple logo) again, wait till the phone boots and restore from iTunes

A few words of advice/warning…

• The Pwnage tool method I mentioned above will not work for newer iPhone 3Gs devices with a later boot rom (iboot) than 359.3 (google for instructions to find it)
• DO NOT update to official 3.1.3 on your iPhone 3Gs if you want to jailbreak it now… that will update your boot rom so you’ll have to sit out until the next exploit is discovered and released

So, it’s been almost a day since I updated my iPhone 3Gs with 3.1.3 and I am yet to experience a dropped call… I started to believe that the 3.1.3 has probably more than what it actually states it does. All in all, I am a happy camper so far, with no dropped calls and my super fast tethering… you know, I sometimes get upwards of 4Mbps speeds on my iPhone when tethered

Also, I have noticed one other improvement in 3.1.3.. the touch screen performance in the bottom area of the screen (closer to the home button) has improved considerably… earlier, when I drew a straight line (in any line drawing app), the line used to taper off toward the center of the phone and this was very evident when playing games like FlightControl, where I had to tap the planes coming from that side of the screen multiple times to get hold of them. So far, not a bad update for me here…

Default desktop on UNR

 Everyone was getting a netbook lately and so did we… why not, they are relatively cheap (I meant, less expensive.. though same can be said of build quality on a lot of these in the market), tiny, ultra mobile and well, can do what a computer on the go should be able to do. We first got a MSI Wind U120 and really liked the not so small screen in a amazingly small package, but the keyboard was something that annoyed me a lot.. but again, that is to be expected in such a size right? Anyway, we found enough gripes about the MSI that we returned it our favorite store.. Costco and got a Samsung NC10, which supposedly has a better keyboard, more battery life, has bluetooth and built better than the MSI…More importantly tho’, my wife really liked the pink color.. after all this tiny computer was for her.. so anyway, we now own a Samsung NC10 and are really happy with it. It came with Windows XP and performed well for what we intended it to do, like the usual emails, word processing, connecting to office computer via Remote Desktop (rarely) and mostly watching streaming video (not HD of course).

So ubuntu came out with their latest release 9.04 code named ‘Jaunty Jackalope’ (funny, I know ) which included the usual desktop version (which I promptly upgraded my desktop to) and a server version, but also new in this release was a version custom built for netbooks called the Ubuntu Netbook Refresh (UNR) which supposedly was optimized for the small screens of the netbooks… so that sounded interesting, and oh yeah, the screen shots that were floating around on the web only added to the urge to get it on our NC10, and soon enough I downloaded the image and got it onto a 2GB USB drive (the instructions and tools are available on ubuntu website) and used it to boot into Ubuntu to give it a try..

First impressions… the default desktop style is the new netbook style, which has all the applets (that’s what they call them) arranged into pages, and favorites page  (seen in the screenshot) being the default. It came with the usual firefox for browsing and a nice little app called pidgin for instant messaging which can handle almost all the well known IM formats out there and a bunch of games, all the usual Gnome stuff and as well as Open Office.

Did I like it? hell yeah.. I should say the new UI itself won me over, and I wanted to get it on my netbook, so I started the partition manager and discovered that the default has 3 partitions (all primary) on the 160GB HDD. One tiny partition for the restore windows thingy, one for the XP partition and one additional NTFS partition (presumably for storage etc.,), but I guess that’s the default setup with most XP netbooks out there, since I saw the same setup on the MSI as well… I had to resize the last NTFS partition to make room for the linux installation, and created an extended partition from the newly created free space, in which I created a logical partition for installing Ubuntu (formatted it to the new EXT4 fs, and set it as mount point ‘/’) leaving 3 gig for linux swap (I have 2 gig RAM). I did this as I am used to doing this since the early days of linux installation, but for most novices out there, you don’t have to mess with anything… I think the install procedure let’s you pick the drive you want to re size and does all this automatically.(**A word of caution.. messing with partitions is relatively risky procedure, so do this with care and make sure you backup your important files before you start such an activity!!!**… u have been warned )… then I proceeded with install and I am not sure how long it too, ‘coz I did this before going to bed, and by morning, ubuntu was ready on my NC10…. the grub bootloader was installed by default and it had options for the Windows XP on my other partition and also to the boot loader on the tiny restore partition.

I started playing with ubuntu on the NC10 for a few days, and there were some strange problems with wifi card at the begining, but they seem to have disappeared after I started messing with the drivers and finally reverted back to the original driver… anyways, finally after a day or two of messing around and several restarts, I got my wifi card working.. In case you are facing similar issues, the driver that loaded by default ‘ath5k’ was the one that finally worked.. I wasn’t sure if it was the restart that fixed, or the intallation of backports drivers, but the maddogwifi didn’t seem to work and during the time I was having trouble with wifi in ubuntu, I learned that restart from ubuntu is not really resetting everything.. you had to shutdown and start again.. and also, the problems with wifi were probably because the wifi card was disabled somehow (I am saying this ‘coz during that time, wifi wasn’t working in windows xp either)… anyways, since it started working again, I assumed the restarts fixed it actually, and hopefully that’s something which happened only with me and I’ll try to forget and think it never happened

Once I got my wifi working, I really tried to use it for a few days, and honestly wanted to like it and alsmost convinced my wife in using ubuntu more than windows xp, but I failed to do so, and I’ll tell you why… firstly, the things I liked about the UNR on NC10. The system booted up fairly quickly, well under a minute and defintiely faster than windows, and also behaved well when going into sleep and coming out of it. To my surprise, a lot of feature keys (fn + keys), like brightness control, volume control, sleep etc., worked right out of the box without any tweaking. As I already mentioned, the applets and the animations when launching them were nice eye candy if nothing else, but the netbook UI is probably good for the tasks that netbooks are inteneded for.. well thought of .. in case you think differently of the new UI (maybe because every app takes up most, if not all of the screen etc.,), you can always switch to the desktop version. And if you are a fan of linux, that’s one big thing you’ll like about this whole setup…

…but here are the not so good things about UNR on NC10. My first gripe is about the screen brightness. The screen on NC10 was a lot brighter than I wouldn need when under windows, and most of the time, I keep the brightness at 50% or lower in xp, but in Ubuntu, the screen brightness (which always defaulted to 50% on restart) was all gone.. the 100% brightness in ubuntu is definitely no 100% I’ve seen in windows, and tho’ usuable at around 80%, it really seemed too dull, and especially the brown theme probably made it look worse.. and to add salt to the injury, everytime the screen goes dim due to inactivity or because system went into sleep and is awaken, the brightness is restored back to 50% or something which is too dull, and I had to increase the brightness again which is very annoying. Also, the brightness keys were a little too refined, and to get to 100% from 50%, it feels like I had to hit the brightness up some 20 times (maynot be the real count, but that’s how you feel it. U can always keep holding it until it reaches 100%, but you get the idea of how frustrating this is…). The second gripe is, overall, the system felt sluggish. It boots up very quickly, but once it’s up, the browsing seemed sluggish and I don’t think the included video drivers performed as well as the windows drivers, so for most part, ubuntu felt slower than windows xp. And when it comes to non-techies, installing various plugins for regular browsing habits is a big turn off… I won’t blame ubuntu for this, as they did include all non-proprietary stuff but that’s not everything.  Some other simple things, for which I am sure there are hacks, like the key to turn on/off wifi doesn’t work, and this could be a very important thing while on road to preserve battery life.

So now that I have used UNR on NC10 for about a couple of weeks, how do I feel about it? Well, for once, mainstream linux distros are paying attention to the rapidly increasing netbook segment which is welcome move, but the UNR edition is still not purely plug and play on the NC10. I did like the interface, but it still seemed a bit sluggish, so overall, we find ourselves using windows xp more often than the UNR… and it’s been two weeks, so I am bored already. I am yet to install my favorite Mac os X on NC10, but based on the chatter on the net, I will need to replace the wifi card, so I am still holding off, and I own a macbook pro and that is my primary laptop, so I am not so inclined to install os X on the NC10 yet. But good ‘ol MS released the RC1 of windows 7 yesterday, and I really liked the new windows on my desktop so far, and I’ve heard it’s pretty good on netbooks too… so up next, windows 7 on NC10

pal

Note: this article does not speak about the details of implementing DWR, but rather talks about a specific situation. If you are interested in DWR, but are not aware of it already, I suggest you begin with the getting started guide from the creators themselves, available here..
http://directwebremoting.org/dwr/getstarted

As a full time java developer, DWR seemed to be a nice solution to my problem. I was really surprised by the ease of use and the time it took to get things started… did I mention the capability of integrating DWR directly with Spring beans , there was no special configuration involved in working with spring beans.. until you come across a situation like I did, having multiple Spring Context files, which is quite normal once you start using more and more spring in your application and the ApplicationContext.xml really started to grow to an extent where it becomes to large and complex to deal with. Well, whatever the reasons, if you have multiple spring context files that your application is setup to work with, then the basic getting started guide will not be enough to use the spring beans directly with DWR. Here I’d tell you what’s that extra step that’s needed in such situations…

Well, that’s simple too… you’ll just have to add a couple of extra entries to the web.xml (if you don’t already have them).. a context-param named “contextConfigLocation” which will contain the links to all your spring context files, and a spring ContextLoaderListener. That’s it really.

    <context-param>
      <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
      <param-value>
         /WEB-INF/classes/applicationContext.xml
         /WEB-INF/classes/transaction.xml
         /WEB-INF/classes/dao.xml
         /WEB-INF/classes/strutsBeans.xml
         /WEB-INF/classes/whatever.xml
      </param-value>
    </context-param>

    <listener>
      <listener-class>
        org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener
      </listener-class>
    </listener>

So in addition to the usual DWR servlet and it’s servlet mapping, you will need the above two entries to make your DWR look at multiple spring context files.. Hope this helps someone.

pal

UPDATE:
As noted by commenter “Niksa Jakovljevic“, a much simpler way around this is to specify the location of the context file in the bean declaration of dwr.xml like this… (thanks Niksa Jakovljevic )

  <create creator="spring" javascript="MySpringBean">
    <param name="beanName" value="mySpringBean" />
    <param name="location" value="../myApplicationContext.xml" />
  </create>

Also, if you are loading the spring contexts in other location (like struts-config.xml), then using the ContextLoaderListner in web.xml will load duplicate instances of the Spring beans which might lead to various problems….

At this point, I tried the only other thing I knew that would help in a situation like this… I put the phone into DFU mode (google/youTube it..) and tried to connect it to my mac… “boom” (as steve says ) there it is.. iTunes tells me that it found my iPhone and needs to restore it… voila.. I restored it with 2.1 firmware again, and everything is back to normal. So lesson learnt.. be a little more careful with system files when messing with precious gadgets like these… hope this helps someone…

pal

‘n+1′ selects problem is a situation where a table ‘A’ in database has 1 to many relationship with an other table ‘B’, and for every row that we need from table A, there could be n rows in table B and in a straight forward mapping situation, we might have to write ‘1′ select query for table A and ‘n’ select queries for table B to build the appropriate domain objects. Obviously, there are clever ways to doing this.. for instance, we can join the tables and write just one query, which would return ‘n’ rows, that’s where my problem begins…. well that wasn’t as brief as I wanted, but I hope you got the basic idea… in case you are still not clear, why don’t you google “n+1 selects problem”?

So I had my query which returns me n rows with each row containing data from table A and table B. Each of the n rows contain the same table A information, with unique table B information… so on the java side, this should convert to one domain object (of A) which containins n objects (of B) as a collection. After reading a bit, I quickly found that iBatis has a “groupBy” attribute for the resultMap element which does this…

To make things clear, let me explain the whole thing in a little more technical fashion..

So lets assume our tables were:

Table A: {a_id: number, attr1: varchar}
Table B: {b_id: number, a_id: number, attr2: varchar}

Our domain objects (aka. value objects) are:

public class A {
int      id;
String attr1;
List     bList;  //A collection of Object 'B's
}
public class B {
int           id;
String attr2;
}

Lets assume table A and B had the following data that we want  to retrieve as a single instance of A, with a list of Bs (2 Bs in the list).

Table A: [1, 'item a1']
Table B: [1, 1, 'item b1'], [2, 1, 'item b2']

From the above sample data, we expect to see the following object in java.. (JSON representation)

A a = { id:1, attr1:'item a1', bList:[ { id:1, attr2:'item b1' },
                                       { id:2, attr2:'item b2' } ] };

To acheive this result using iBatis, all we need to do in your java code is to call this one statement.. (assuming you are using Spring with iBatis).

A a = (A) getSqlMapClientTemplate().queryForObject("queryA");

or for you who hate, fear or just ignorant of spring framework, replace the getSqlMapClientTemplate() with your own instance of SqlMapClient

And now for the actual SQL Map XML which instructs iBatis to do what we wanted..

<sqlMap>
   <resultMap id="result_queryA" class="your.path.A" groupBy="a_id">
      <result property="id" column="a_id" jdbcType="NUMERIC" />
      <result property="attr1" column="attr1"  jdbcType="VARCHAR" />
      <result property="bList" resultMap="result_queryB" />
   </resultMap>

   <resultMap id="result_queryB" class="your.path.B">
      <result property="id" column="b_id" />
      <result property="attr2" column="attr2" />
   </resultMap>

   <select id="queryA" resultMap="result_queryA">
      select * from A,B where A.id = B.id
   </select>
</sqlMap>

That’s it.. that should work in our scenario here… even if we have more records in our tables, this SQL Map would still be good, and you would query for List instead of Object from java… that was easy, wasn’t it?

Well, this was really not the motivation behind my post here.. there was plenty of help to this problem, and similar examples were all over the net. Then, one might wonder why I took the time in writing so much when it is already written over and over again? I wrote this up, because I wanted to discuss something that I couldn’t find help for.. and I had to repeat the above thing to make this post complete..

My actual problem was a little different than the example from above. That is, when you need a list of primitives in your domain object instead of a list of another domain object. In our example terms, my object A didn’t have a list of Object Bs, instead it had just the list of Strings (attr2).

There wasn’t much help available to my problem, and I really spent a shameful amount of time trying to solve this problem with a similar solution as above.. as it turns out, it wasn’t much different than the solution above. Instead of my “result_queryB” resultMap return an instance of object B, it will return an instance of java.lang.String. That was simple, but my confusion was with what to use for property attribute, as it is a required attribute for “result” element in the map and I really didn’t know how it would work… again, as it turns out, you just don’t use any value for property … so in my case the resultMap “result_queryB” would look like this..

   <resultMap id="result_queryB" class="java.lang.String">
      <result property="" column="attr2" />
   </resultMap>

I guess the above resultMap would work even if you enter some value for property, as iBatis mapper would not even read this attribute for primitive types like String, Long etc., It is misleading to have the property attribute of result element as a required attribute when there are situations like this for which there is no use for property…

I hope this post would help somebody like me in not chasing around a simple problem like this..

pal

Well… after drooling over the macs at my local mall for a while, I finally got one for myself a little over a year ago.  I was really impressed with mac OS X and especially liked the idea of widgets.

I am a web application developer by profession, and constantly find myself using things like MySQL and Tomcat. I wanted a widget which could easily start/stop these for me, and after a little searching I found one for tomcat but it never worked for me… at this point I wondered if I could make one for myself, and was pleasantly surprised to know that widgets are nothing but mini web-pages built almost completely by html/javascript. So, I began developing one for myself and got it almost working… well, at least the tomcat part works

So, here’s the widget I made… the mysql part seems to have some problem with start and tomcat should work just fine. The widget has a log console too (not fancy).. if anyone is interested in improving it, please feel free to modify it as you wish.

pal