I have an enum attribute inside a backing bean which haves 2 attributes: "id" (int attribute) and "label" (String attribute). In the DB I need to persist only the "id", but I still need the label value to use on my view. The problem is: #Enumerated only gives me the option to persist using EnumType.ORDINAL or EnumType.STRING. There's any way to persist just the enum's "id" attribute in the DB? (btw... i'm using Hibernate).
Thanks!
fd's comment is in place. Nevertheless, if you're in a real need of this you can tweak the solution a bit, instead of persisting an enum, you can mark it as transient and add a property e.g. enumId to an entity class, that you'll persist instead. Than the only thing left is to synchronize the enum's value through getter and setter method of an enumId
The id and the attribute are two facets of the same thing. They have the same meaning. Storing them both in the DB is redundant, and violates the Third Normal Form of database design.
For a JPA (Hibernate) entity, I suggest you define the ORDINAL (which is the id) as your field and as suggested above by "Master Slave" define the String as a transient. Then define #PostLoad and the setter of the id to convert the ordinal to the name (which is your label) using name() and convert back using valueOf(String name) in the setter of the label.
Related
In Hibernate, to specify a column for joining association, #JoinColumn annotation in used, for example like this:
#ManyToOne
#JoinColumn(name="address_id")
public Address getAddress() {
return address;
}
In most cases, name of the column is snaked-cased class name plus _id. So it is reasonable to expect from Hibernate to derive it automatically (as it is done, for example, in Django's ORM). But is such behavior implemented somehow?
It is not necessary, JPA follows convention over configuration principle which means there are allways some default values that you can override with annotations.
In case of #JoinColumn, the default column name is generated like this: <field_name>_<id_column_name>
field_name is address in your case, and id_column_name is referring to the related entity's id, which is id. Thus, you get address_id by default.
It is not necessary to have #JoinColumn annotation. You can always override it. If you won't provide it in your code then Hibernate will automatically generate one for you i.e. default name for your column.
In Hibernate 4.x, is there any way to get a list of persistent fields at runtime? By persistent fields I don't mean DB column names, but POJO field names or property names (depending on access type for a particular entity). Also, is there a method to get/set a persistent field's value given a field name as a string, regardless of whether it's a field or property name?
It seems that everything I need (and more) is contained in ClassMetadata class (documentation).
I can get the metadata for a particular class by using SessionFactory.getClassMetadata(entityClass) and then use metadata.getPropertyNames(), etc.
I use EmailAlert bean as DTO to get data by means of Hibernate.
So, my class contains only fields that I have in DB.
But in some cases I need additional fields to be in EmailAlert to hold intermediate data. For example "caption" field - will be calculated on java side depends of user locale, time, etc.
So, I have some variants to solve this issue.
Add additional property (ex: caption) to EmailAlert bean, but do not map it with any field of DB table.
Drawback: In this case we have to do not use "caption" property in hashCode() and equals() because as:
It really don't have a matter - field holds only intermediate data
I am not sure it not be a cause of problem with cache and Hibernate itself.
I think it is very ugly to have a property of class but do not use it in equals() and hashCode() methods.
Someone can be confusing in the future with this logic.
Extend EmailAlert as EmailAlertExt with adding of "caption" property. And constructor that takes EmailAlert as argument.
But in this case I am not sure underwater stones in case I will store EmailAlert as EmailAlertExt bean again into DB.
Extend EmailAlert as EmailAlertExt2 with adding of "caption" property and take a refference to the original object. In this case EmailAlertExt2 will behave as original EmailAlert, but with additional property we need. In case we save EmailAlert we could call getOriginalValue() of EmailAlertExt2 that will return refference to original object.
Drawback: too many coding :)
Guys, which of these solutions is better? May be someone have other proposals?
Use '#Transient' it won't map to db hibernate will ignore this field
Extending a model object just because you want to separate mapped vs non-mapped fields is not a good idea. A good guideline would be to ask yourself the question "What is the difference between an EmailAlert and an EmailAlertX, and can I clearly define the situations where I would use one over the other?". If you cannot answer that question cleanly, or if you realize that you will always be using your subclass over the parent class, that is a sure sign that the parent class should be abstract or that you have too many classes.
In your particular case, it would make more sense to have both the mapped, and non-mapped properties on the same class, and to mark the non-mapped properties so that your ORM provider does not try to process them. You can do this by annotating these properties as being #Transient.
public class EmailAlert implements Serializable {
#Id
private Long id;
#Column(name = "recipient")
private String recipient;
#Transient
private transient String caption;
// Constructor, Getters/Setters, etc
}
Also, with respect to to your comment on hashcode/equals methods. You do not and should not include every property of a Java Bean in these methods. Only include those properties that are:
required to uniquely identify the object
are (fairly) guaranteed to have the same value over the lifecycle of the object
It sounds like the EmailAlert object you need at the moment is a business object, because of the "intermediate data" and "calculated on java side" bits.
Maybe use the EmailAlertDto object to populate the fields of the EmailAlertBusiness and store the extra caption field and the methods in the business object.
What is the difference between #Embedded annotation technique and #OneToOne annotation technique because in Embedded the java class contain "Has a" relationship in class and with the help of #Embedded annotation we persist the has a object in database. and in OneToOne relationship we also persist the has a object in database.
#OneToOne is for mapping two DB tables that are related with a one to one relationship. For example a Customer might always have one record in a Name table.
Alternatively if those name fields are on the Customer table (not in a separate table) then you might want an #embedded. On the face of it you could just add the name fields as standard attributes to the Customer entity but it can be useful if those same columns appear on multiple tables (for example you might have the name columns on a Supplier table).
Its the difference between composition and aggregation. #Embedded objects are always managed within the lifecycle of their parents. If the parent is updated or deleted, they are updated or deleted as well. #OneToOne objects may mimic composition via the cascadeType option of their #Join annotation, but by default they are aggregated, aka their lifecycle is separate from that of their parent objects.
#Embedded is used with Value Objects (Objects which have a meaning only when attached to an Object) whereas one to one mapping is between two objects having their own existence and meaning.
For e.g.
Value Object and #Embedded: If we have a User class and this class has an address Object in it, it can be considered as a value object as the address alone does not have any significance until unless associated with a user. Here address object can be annotated with #Embedded.
One to One mapping and #OneToOne: If we have a User class and this class has a 'Father' Object or a 'Mother' object, we would want to annotate the 'Father' or 'Mother' instance as #OneToOne as 'Father' or 'Mother' have their own meaning and existence and are not Value objects to User class.
A closely related difference is between #OneToMany and #ElementCollection. Both are used to save instance variables of Collection type in Java class. The difference being, #ElementCollection is to be used when the elements of Collection being saved are Value Objects whereas #OneToMany is used when the elments and object have well defined meaning and existence.
Use #OneToOne, only if fields can be reused. Otherwise, go for #Embeddable.
A quote from Beginning Hibernte, 3rd Edition:
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with mapping a one-to-one association between two entities where one is not
a component of (i.e., embedded into) the other. The relationship is often somewhat suspect, however. You should
give some thought to using the embedded technique described previously before using the #OneToOne annotation.
#Embeddable:
If the fields in an entity (X) are contained within the same table as another entity (Y), then entity X is called "component" in hibernate terms or "embedded" in JPA terms. In any case, JPA or hibernate do not allow to use 2nd table to store such embedded entities.
Generally, we think of normalizing a table when data is being reused by more than one table. Example: A Customer (id, name, street, city, pin, landmark) can be normalized into Customer(id, name) and CustomerAddress(cust_id, street, city, pin, landmark). In this case, we can reuse CustomerAddress by linking the same using cust_id with other tables. But if this reuse is not required in your application, then we can just keep all columns in one table.
So, a thumb rule is,
If reuse -> #OneToOne,
If no reuse -> #Embeddable
#Embedded is typically to represent a composite primary key as an embeddable class:
#Entity
public class Project {
#EmbeddedId ProjectId id;
:
}
#Embeddable
Class ProjectId {
int departmentId;
long projectId;
}
The primary key fields are defined in an embeddable class. The entity contains a single primary key field that is annotated with #EmbeddedId and contains an instance of that embeddable class. When using this form a separate ID class is not defined because the embeddable class itself can represent complete primary key values.
#OneToOne is for mapping two DB tables that are related with a one to one relationship. #Id will be the primary key.
Assuming a JPA entity with (for example) an long id generated automatically:
#Entity
#AutoProperty
public class SomeItem {
#Id
#GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.AUTO)
private long Id;
...
}
Is there any reason to not generate setter and getters for this Id? One might be tempted to not generate a setter for example, since it is the responsibility of JPA to generate the ID.
I see that other comments has misguided you so I feel myself obliged to elaborate on this issue a bit, even though I can't give you a scientific and complete answer. #vcetinick wrote the current accepted answer:
You may find that you may be able to get away [..] from the persistence side of things.
This quote in particular is wrong. All depends on where you put your #Id annotation. The specification says:
If the entity has field-based access, the persistence provider runtime
accesses instance variables directly.
Thus you are not required in any way to provide a setter or getter. Because you annotated your field and not a getter method (annotating the setter method will be ignored and have no bearing).
However, if you write a getter method, and annotated this method with your #Id annotation instead of your field, then we would tell our persistence provider to access our field through the accessor (getter) and mutator (setter) methods and not use reflection. In that case, both a getter and a setter should be present. The book Pro JPA 2: Mastering the Java™ Persistence API writes on page 71 (bold markup by me!):
When property access mode is used, the same contract as for JavaBeans applies, and there must be getter and setter methods for the persistent properties. The type of property is determined by the return type of the getter method and must be the same as the type of the single parameter passed into the setter method. Both methods must be either public or protected visibility.
Therefore, I usually annotate my id field, and write both a setter and getter method, but the setter method I give protected access. I just don't want any other pieces of code to have easy write access to such an important field. I don't know if this would cause problems in other domains. I'm no expert. But I don't find any rationale either as to why not setup an id attribute in this way. See also the Netbeans forums.
You may find that you may be able to get away without putting a getter/setter on the JPA Entity from the persistence side of things. But if you start dealing with entities that are serialized from other sources, even from your view in some cases, you will need a way to set the ID of the entity to let JPA know that it is dealing with an existing entity, if you cant set the id, then the persistence layer will just treat it as a new Object.
Id is your primary key without it you will never able to insert records in the database.
In your case #GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.AUTO) it ensures that id will be generated for each persist but then also you will need a method to access it since it is primary identification of entity you should provide access to it .
Its like you asking some person his name and he doesn't provide it to you and you would thing he is just being rude .