Moving existing Spring projects to use Spring Roo

If you are moving your existing Spring-based project to Roo, you can make out from this recipe that you should do the following:

1. Remove the toString method and add the @RooToString annotation to all your existing classes.

2. Remove the implementation of Serializable interfaces from classes and instead annotate the classes with the @RooSerializable annotation.

3. Remove getters and setters methods from your Java classes and instead annotate the classes with the @RooJavaBean annotation.

Tip

Registering the service class with Spring's application context

Using Spring Roo you can't create a service class, which is automatically registered with Spring's application context; therefore, if you want your service class to be auto-registered, then annotate it with the @Service annotation. The service class will be registered with Spring's application context as long as it is inside the top-level directory (for more information refer to the <component-scan> element, described in the Creating a Roo project recipe).

@RooToString—customizing the name of the toString method

We saw that using the @RooToString annotation creates a method named toString in the corresponding AspectJ ITD file. You can use the toStringMethod attribute of the @RooToString annotation to specify a custom name for the toString method, as shown here:

@RooToString(toStringMethod = "myTostring")
public class MyCustomClass { private String myAttr; }

In the given code, the toStringMethod attribute specifies myToString as the name of the method to act as the toString method for the MyCustomClass. The ITD file corresponding to the @RooToString annotation: MyCustomClass_Roo_ToString.aj will now create a method similar to toString but with the name myToString, as shown here:

privileged aspect MyCustomClass_Roo_ToString
{
   public String MyCustomClass.mytostring ()
   {
      StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
      sb.append("MyAttr: " ).append(getMyAttr());
      return sb.toString();
   }
}

@RooToString—excluding properties from the toString method

In some cases, you may want to restrict properties from being part of the auto-generated toString method. The @RooToString annotation provides an excludeFields attribute, which lets you specify an array of attributes that should be excluded from the auto-generated toString method, as shown here:

@RooToString(excludeFields={"someAttribute"})
public class MyCustomClass { .. }

In this code, the @RooToString annotation instructs that the toString method of the MyCustomClass class must not include the someAttribute property.

See also

• The Adding attributes to a Java class recipe explains how you can add attributes to a Java class using roo

• The Creating a Java interface recipe explains how you can create a Java interface from the Roo shell