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Migrating Benerator Projects

Guidelines

We try to keep execution behaviur and programming interfaces as stable as possible between releases. However, if we consider a behavior as wrong, we do change it.

If you experience generation behaviour changes between Benerator releases, please check this migration guide section in its newest version. Often, we will provide a flag in the <setup> attributes which make Benerator keep previous behavior.

General Advice For Developers of Custom Components

If we need to change an interface in order to improve it or to provide new features, we always try to adapt its direct child class(es) in a way that hides the change from existing implementations.

So, if you are programming custom implementations of Benerator's service provider interfaces (SPIs), it makes your code more stable against changes, if you inherit from a child class of this interface instead of implementing it directly.

Migration from 1.1.x to 2.0.0

If you did not program custom implementations of Benerator's interfaces or classes, existing projects are supposed to work like before (but faster).

If you programmed a custom distribution by implementing the Distribution directly (and did not inherit from a child class), the bad news is that your code will not be compatible with Benerator 2.0.0.

The good news is that this is easily fixed: Edit the Java code of your custom distribution class and replace the ìmplements Distribution directive with extends AbstractDistribution.

In case you programmed a custom Sequence, you have two options:

  1. If the sequence fetches and caches all generator data in its applyTo() method, then have extends DetachedSequence
  2. else implement the applyTo() method appropriately.