Hibernate - Reading a datasource from a jndi

I was writing this utility that read the data produced by the main application, but presented it in a different way - basically sliced and diced the information such that it was more meaningful to the user.
My goal for this utility was simple - provide as little configurations as possible - make it work more like a plug-and-play utility.
To achieve this, the first goal was to read the same jndi’s the main application was reading to fetch data. I didnt want the user to have to re-enter the connection params. Fairly simple request right?
Here’s what i had to do to achieve this:
Step1 - The JNDI was already defined - in the tomcat server.xml in this case. So make a note of the jndi name
   
        auth=”Container”
        type=”javax.sql.DataSource”
….
Step2 - Update your Spring application context to include the datasource bean as follows,
 
          class=”org.springframework.jndi.JndiObjectFactoryBean”>
      /jdbc/unity”/>  
     
   
Step2 - Last step - update your Context.xml (if you dont have one, create one under META-INF)
  
         jdbc/unity”
                       type=”javax.sql.DataSource”
                       global=”jdbc/unity”/>
  

Thats it!

Formatting Struts 2 s:checkboxlist tag

I recently had the need to format the struts 2 tag. By default it appears as a horizontal formatted list (checkBox1[] checkBox2[] checkBox3[] etc) but since the number of checkboxes were large, i wanted them to appear in a tabular format.

Here's what i did:
- After doing a quick Google search i figured that i needed to overwrite the default Freemarker template.
- All the templates are located in the struts-core.jar

1. Create a new directory structure at the root of my application called template/myapp and template/myapp_simple
2. The template we're looking for is checkboxlist.ftl. This is located in the struts-core.jar under templates/xhtml folder. We want to override that, so lets create our own version of it. To start with lets copy the existing freemarker templates (located in struts-core.jar templates/xhtml) into your new template/myapp folder.
3. Now edit the filer checkboxlist.ftl. As you can see its referring to the template stored under the simple folder.
<#include "/${parameters.templateDir}/simple/checkboxlist.ftl" />
Lets change that so that it points to your directory structure
<#include "/${parameters.templateDir}/myapp_simple/checkboxlist.ftl" />
4. Now lets copy the checkboxlist.ftl located in the template/simple folder (from the struts-core.jar) into your template/myapp_simple folder.
5. Lets override this file now. What i want to do is make all the checkboxes appear in a 4 column table. So here's what my checkboxlist.ftl looks like.

<#assign itemCount = 0/>
<#if parameters.list?exists>
<@s.iterator value="parameters.list">
<#assign itemCount = itemCount + 1/>
<#if parameters.listKey?exists>
<#assign itemKey = stack.findValue(parameters.listKey)/>
<#else>
<#assign itemKey = stack.findValue('top')/>

<#if parameters.listValue?exists>
<#assign itemValue = stack.findString(parameters.listValue)/>
<#else>
<#assign itemValue = stack.findString('top')/>

<#assign itemKeyStr=itemKey.toString() />
<#if itemCount%4=0>

<#elseif itemCount%4=2>

<#elseif itemCount%4=3>

<#else>


<#rt/>
<#if tag.contains(parameters.nameValue, itemKey)>
checked="checked"<#rt/>

<#if parameters.disabled?default(false)>
disabled="disabled"<#rt/>

<#if parameters.title?exists>
title="${parameters.title?html}"<#rt/>

<#include "/${parameters.templateDir}/simple/scripting-events.ftl" />
<#include "/${parameters.templateDir}/simple/common-attributes.ftl" />
/>
${itemValue?html}
<#if itemCount%4=0>

<#else>



<#rt/>

<#else>

Thats it