Task 2: Persisting Employers and Skills

You will need to have completed the setup steps before starting this section.

AbstractEntity

We’ve replaced the abstract class JobField with an even more abstracted class aptly named, AbstractEntity. This class holds the fields and methods that are common across the Job class and the classes it contains as fields.

1. We will be creating tables for the subclasses that inherit from AbstractEntity but not a table for this parent class. Therefore, give AbstractEntity the @MappedSuperclass annotation.
2. Since all of the subclasses of AbstractEntity will be entities themselves, add the @Id and @GeneratedValue annotations to the field id.
3. Each subclass will also inherit the name field from AbstractEntity. Add appropriate validation annotations so that:
   • a user cannot leave this field blank when creating an object.
   • there are reasonable limitations on the size of the name string. Keep in mind that the name field will be shared across Job, Employer, and Skill classes. Some employer names might be longer than 50 characters.

Models

In the last assignment, a Job object contained string fields for employer and core competency data. This employer and skill (formerly core competency) information about a particular job will now be stored in classes themselves. These items themselves will hold their own supplementary information.

1. Open the Employer model class. In addition to the fields inherited from AbstractEntity, Employer should have a string field for location. Add the field for location with validation that ensures it is not empty and has a reasonable length. In addition, add public accessor methods to Employer.

2. Employer is a class that will be mapped to one of our tables. Make sure the class has the @Entity annotation, as well as the no-arg constructor required for Hibernate to create an object.
3. In the model class Skill, add a field for a longer description of the skill, named description, with public accessor methods. Some hiring managers like to have more information available about the nature of a given programming language or framework.
4. As with Employer, give this class the @Entity annotation and be sure it contains a no-arg constructor.

Data Layer

To map the Employer and Skill classes to your techjobs database, you’ll add data access interfaces for these relational objects, similar to the existing JobRepository interface. Like JobRepository, make use of the Spring Data CrudRepository interface to map our objects.

1. In models/data, create a new interface EmployerRepository.

• EmployerRepository should extend CrudRepository.
• EmployerRepository should be annotated with @Repository.

2. Repeat the steps above for an interface, SkillRepository.

Controllers

With the employer repository in place, we will reference this to send object information through the EmployerController handlers. EmployerController contains two handlers with missing information. Your task here is to make use of the EmployerRepository class in these handlers.

1. Add a private field of EmployerRepository type called employerRepository to EmployerController. Give this field an @Autowired annotation.
2. Add an index method that responds at /employers with a list of all employers in the database. This method should use the template employers/index. To figure out the name of the model attribute you should use to pass employers into the view, review this template.
3. processAddEmployerForm already takes care of sending the form back if any of the submitted employer object information is invalid. However, it doesn’t yet contain the code to save a valid object. Use employerRepository and the appropriate method to do so.
4. displayViewEmployer will be in charge of rendering a page to view the contents of an individual employer object. It will make use of that employer object’s id field to grab the correct information from employerRepository. optEmployer is currently initialized to null. Replace this using the .findById() method with the right argument to look for the given employer object from the data layer.

5. Create a SkillController class and replicate the steps you followed above for EmployerController. The new controller should have the methods, index, displayAddSkillForm, processAddSkillForm, and displayViewSkill. These methods should behave exactly as the corresponding methods in EmployerController. The relevant templates have already been created for you.

At this point, uncomment all remaining methods in TestTaskTwo, if you have not done so already. You’ll need to add an import statement for the new controller to the test file.

Test It with SQL

The employer and skill view templates for adding and viewing these objects are made for you. Before you move on, test your application now to make sure it runs as expected. You should be able to create Employer and Skill objects and view them.

1. Start up your application – don’t forget to have your SQL server running – and go to the Add Jobs view from the application’s navigation menu.

2. You won’t be able to add a job yet, but you’ll see a link to Add Employers and Add Skills in the form. Click them and proceed to check the functionality of the forms that follow.

3. Be sure to test your validation requirements and error handling.

4. SQL TASK: In queries.sql under “Part 2”, write a query to list the names of the employers in St. Louis City. Do NOT specify an ordering for the query results.

Throughout your work, refer to the demo app as needed.