Getting Unit Of Work without JSP context

Question

We are developing an application using Toplink and ADF Datacontrols. We have timer (which starts right after deploy) which reads data from magnetic card reader and stores them into database (via Toplink). Our main problem is getting Unit Of Work (server session). If user interacts with application via jsp pages, obtaining uow is done from TopLinkDataControl (getAssociatedUnitOfWork()). But timer lives on its own, it has no jsp pages to get context from.
We know one solution - getting server session from toplink descriptor (absolute path needed) - XMLProjectReader.read("c:\\...\\toplink-deployment-descriptor.xml"). Is there another way to create Unit Of Work for our timer in order to last whole application existence? Thanks.

Answer 1

I was wrong, when I thought, that XMLProjectReader.read() with absolute path works. Your solution seems to be similar, with the same result. I'll describe my problem more closely:
- Our web apllication consists of 2 projects - Model and ViewController. Each has set the classpath pointing to classes of the opposite project.
- The only way, that I know of starting a Clock (from Model, Runnable) without creating JSP page is instatiating it in some servlet's init() method. (Servlet has set 'Load This Servlet When the Web App is Strted" in WEB.XML).
- When I try in my clock to create UnitOfWork by XMLProjectReader.read("c:\\...\\toplink-deployment-descriptor.xml"), I get this error:
EXCEPTION [TOPLINK-3007] (OracleAS TopLink - 10g (9.0.4.5) (Build 040930)): oracle.toplink.exceptions.ConversionException
EXCEPTION DESCRIPTION: The Object [mypackage.MyClass], of class[class java.lang.String] could not be converted to [class java.lang.Class]. Please ensure that the class [class java.lang.Class] is on the CLASSPATH. You may need to use alternate
API passing in the appropriate class loader as required, or setting it
on the default ConversionManager/
INTERNAL EXCEPTION: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: mypackage.MyClass
- mypackage.MyClass is one of many classes from Model, mapped in toplink-deployment-descriptor.xml. It is in classpath of ViewController.
- For the time being, our application runs in JDeveloper, it will be deployed to OracleAS 10g.
Either somebody please help me how to solve above error or maybe suggest how to start my clock together with application deployment (no jsp context).
Thanks.