A guy called harawata has created a plugin for Ibator, which creates code to easily add “limit” clauses to your db-calls. Thank a lot for this (once again invaluable) tool! You might also want to check out his other plugins.

Ok, so now how to add these Plugins to the code generator? You need to compile the classes with ibator.jar in the classpath.

Then enable the Plugin in your ibatorConfig.xml file within the <ibatorContext>:

<ibatorPlugin type=”AddLimitClausePlugin”></ibatorPlugin>

Finally add the resulting Plugin-file to the classpath when calling Ibator:

java -cp ibator.jar:limit.jar org.apache.ibatis.ibator.api.IbatorRunner -configfile ibatorConfig.xml -overwrite

Of course this will also work when starting Ibator from an ant file.

One again the Apache commons library comes to a rescue! Programmer’s little helper in this lesson is the FastDateFormat class. Just instantiate a n object , pass your desired Locale and you are ready to format any Date with date and/or time to your wishes. Either you use the built-in formattes “SHORT, MEDIUM, LONG, FULL” or pass a custom pattern.

Here’s a little example:

import org.apache.commons.lang.time.FastDateFormat;
FastDateFormat df = FastDateFormat.getDateTimeInstance(
FastDateFormat.SHORT, FastDateFormat.SHORT, Locale.US);
System.out.writeln(df.format(creationdate));

FastDateFormat has a lot of initializers and functions to format your date and time values for your needs. Make sure to check out more classes of the org.apache.commons.lang package, that holds a lot of gems which make a java programmer’s day much easier.