11g TP2 and NamedStoredProcedureQuery

Question

OK, this has me baffled.
Documentation on stored procedures and JPA is often unclear, missing, or less relevant (ie., lots of examples for Hibernate XML mapping files, but nothing re: annotations). However TP2 of TopLink now appears to provide some support for stored procedures.
First, several simple questions...
1) Is it possible to represent a stored procedure as one would a table, using annotations?
2) If yes, can these annotations be used to create an object (DAO, interface, etc.) as one would with a table? Basically, an object that represents the returned rows and includes the annotated knowledge to execute the stored procedure?
Assuming the answer to both questions is yes, then...
Clearly, for stored procedures we're not generally talking about something that needs to be persisted.
Here's what I have...
A legacy database containing a number of tables and two stored procedures. I'm tasked with creating a "library" for java apps (and servlets) that need access to this data. In many cases, calling one of the two SPs will suffice. As it stands, Spring is a big player for several existing tools that talk to the DB, with each using its own access methods.
I'm done with the tables and have created interfaces, dao, class, etc.
I'm stuck trying to decide how to handle the stored procedures. I could write POJOs to handle them, but then I lose some of the built-in convenience features of JPA/Hibernate/Spring/etc. I would prefer that developers using the library be able to access everything in a similar manner, whether table or SP.
Let's assume the following (simple) stored procedure, and, for the sake of simplicity, all input and output columns are INT....
CREATE PROCEDURE withParams (item INT)
BEGIN
  SELECT distinct column1,column2
    FROM results
    WHERE column1=item
END
GO Should something along the following "work" for the withParams procedure?
import javax.persistence.Entity;
import oracle.toplink.annotations.NamedStoredProcedureQuery;
@Entity
@NamedStoredProcedureQuery(name="getInfoUsingInput", procedureName="withParams",
         resultClass=Test.class,
         procedureParameters={@StoredProcedureParameter(queryParameter="item")}
public class Test implements java.io.Serializable {
}-David
Message was edited by:
user610697

Answer 1

David,
The @NamedStoredProcedureQuery is intended to be a natural extension to JPA's @NamedQuery where the query returns a result which could either be raw data values or a mapped entity. These are basically intended to allow you to optimize the access to an entity mapped to a table.
TopLink does support mapping onto a virtual table through the use of stored procedures provided you have stored procedures to represent all aspects of the CRUD operations for the entity. This requires you to provide custom queries used StoredProcedureCall for all necessary operations. Your entity will continue to be mapped as if the table exists but at runtime TopLink will use your stored procedures mapping the non existent table's columns onto the IN/OUT parameters of your query.
Does this sound like what you want or is this just a single stored procedures you want to execute and get a mapped read-only entity back?
Doug