Dummy SMTP Server

Papercut is, in my opinion, one of the best tools for a dummy SMTP server. The interface is nice, clean, and best of all, simple and easy to use. Installation took me a few minutes, and all you need to do next is point your application's smtp server to localhost and you can start testing.

Null Check for Java Bean Properties

I was trying to find out an easy way to check nulls in my Java Bean. There is this filter screen where I need to throw an Exception if all the properties are blank. This is required so that the database don't get hit with "Search All" query. I used BeanUtils from Apache Commons to get all the properties and StringUtils to check if the property is blank. Here is a snippet of the code that I used:

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Map<String, String> map = BeanUtils.describe(searchCriteria);
boolean allBlank = true;
if (map != null) {
  for (String key : map.keySet()) {
    if ("class".equalsIgnoreCase(key) || "metaClass".equalsIgnoreCase(key))
      continue;
    if (StringUtils.isNotBlank(map.get(key))) {
      LOG.info("key " + key + " is not null");
      allBlank = false;
      break;
    }
  }
}
if (allBlank) {
  throw new IllegalArgumentException("searchCriteria cannot be blank"));
}
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