Extending AbstractCustomWrapper¶

The simplest way to create a new Custom wrapper is to implement the following two methods of the abstract class com.denodo.vdb.engine.customwrapper.AbstractCustomWrapper:

• public CustomWrapperSchemaParameter[] getSchemaParameters(Map<String, String> inputValues)

  This method has to return the output schema of the Custom wrapper, which is the schema of the data obtained by querying the wrapper. You can develop Custom wrappers whose output schema depends on the values of their input parameters. To do this, implement the method getInputParameters (see section Overriding AbstractCustomWrapper) to define the input parameters of the wrapper. Then, the parameter inputValues will contain the values for these parameters. The output schema is represented as an array of CustomWrapperSchemaParameters objects, which represent fields of the schema. A CustomWrapperSchemaParameter has a name, a type and several other properties (as mandatoriness, nullability, etc.), and an optional array of other CustomWrapperSchemaParameters in case the represented field is compound. In a CustomWrapperSchemaParameter you can also specify the “source type properties” of the fields returned by the wrapper. The section Source Type Properties of the Administration Guide explains why defining these properties may be beneficial to the performance of the queries.

• public void run( CustomWrapperConditionHolder condition, List<CustomWrapperFieldExpression> projectedFields, CustomWrapperResult result, Map<String, String> inputValues)

  Virtual DataPort invokes this method when a user queries the wrapper. Depending on the wrapper’s configuration (see section Configuring a Custom Wrapper), the condition and projectedFields arguments may be taken into account (conditions will be explained in section Dealing with Conditions). These two parameters encapsulate the conditions and the list of projected fields of the query to the wrapper. inputValues contains the input parameters of the wrapper. It only contains a textual representation of the values and does not contain information about their type. The method getInputParameterValue(String name) returns an instance of CustomWrapperInputParameterValue that provides full information about the parameter value and its type. Usually, an implementation of the method run involves analyzing the passed conditions, projected fields and input values, querying the wrapper’s data source and returning the retrieved data to Virtual DataPort. This is done by invoking the method addRow of the result argument, which receives an array of Objects. The array passed to addRow must contain a series of Objects matching the list of projected fields specified in the run method. Also, the types of the Objects must match the schema defined in the method getSchemaParameters

  See the Javadoc of the method getParameterClass() of the class CustomWrapperSchemaParameter to check the appropriate Java class for a “CustomWrapperSchemaParameter” according to its type.

  To obtain the schema of the current execution of the custom wrapper, invoke the method getSchema() of the object CustomWrapperResult passed as parameter of the method “run()”.

  This is the schema returned by the method getSchemaParameters() of the custom wrapper. Invoking this method can be useful in custom wrappers whose output (i.e. what the method getSchemaParameters() returns) changes depending on the input parameters of the wrapper.

By implementing these two methods, you can create a Custom wrapper. However, in some scenarios you may need to override some methods of the AbstractCustomWrapper class to access more advanced features. The next section lists these methods and their default behavior.

There are other useful methods in AbstractCustomWrapper like log(int level, String logMessage) to log information to the server logging files or getCustomWrapperPlan() to access the execution plan and add some information to the trace (see section Updating the Custom Wrapper Plan).