TableEntity Interface

An interface required for table entity types. The TableEntity interface declares getter and setter methods for the common entity properties, and and methods for serialization and deserialization of all entity properties using a property map. Create classes implementing TableEntity to customize property storage, retrieval, serialization and deserialization, and to provide additional custom logic for a table entity.

The Storage client library includes two implementations of TableEntity that provide for simple property access and serialization:

DynamicTableEntity implements TableEntity and provides a simple property map to store and retrieve properties. Use a DynamicTableEntity for simple access to entity properties when only a subset of properties are returned (for example, by a select clause in a query), or for when your query can return multiple entity types with different properties. You can also use this type to perform bulk table updates of heterogeneous entities without losing property information.

TableServiceEntity is an implementation of TableEntity that uses reflection-based serialization and deserialization behavior in its and methods. TableServiceEntity-derived classes with methods that follow a convention for types and naming are serialized and deserialized automatically.

Any class that implements TableEntity can take advantage of the automatic reflection-based serialization and deserialization behavior in TableServiceEntity by invoking the static methods in and in . The class must provide methods that follow the type and naming convention to be serialized and deserialized automatically. When both a getter method and setter method are found for a given property name and data type, then the appropriate method is invoked automatically to serialize or deserialize the data. The reflection code looks for getter and setter methods in pairs of the form

and

where PropertyName is a property name for the table entity, and type is a Java type compatible with the EDM data type of the property. See the table in the class description for TableServiceEntity for a map of property types to their Java equivalents. The StoreAs annotation may be applied with a attribute to specify a property name for reflection on getter and setter methods that do not follow the property name convention. Method names and the attribute of StoreAs annotations are case sensitive for matching property names with reflection. Use the Ignore annotation to prevent methods from being used by reflection for automatic serialization and deserialization. Note that the names "PartitionKey", "RowKey", "Timestamp", and "Etag" are reserved and will be ignored if set with the StoreAs annotation in a subclass that uses the reflection methods.