CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javajpaspring-data-jpa
Erdem Emekligil
Erdem Emekligil

Reputation: 184

How to override an annotation-defined table name in JPA?

I have tables that have this annotation structure in my application and I use JpaRepository for CRUD operations.

@Entity
@Table(name = "FOO")
public class Foo implements Serializable {
  …
}

But I need to override only the table name (not any of the @Column etc. attributes) from an orm.xml or properties file without changing the actual code. I've searched and I couldn't find a way to do it in Spring Data JPA. Am I missing something here or it is not supported?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2381

Answers (1)

Alan Hay
Alan Hay

Reputation: 23226

Firstly, Spring Data is not a JPA provider but simply a 'helper' library providing a wrapper round common persistence operations. The JPA specification however does provide a mechanism for overriding annotations via an XML mapping file. So assuming your provider (Hibernate, EclipseLink, OpenJPA or whatever) fully implements the JPA specification then you should be able to do this.

However it would appear that you cannot override only the table name: unless your column names are mapped to the default values then, as far as I can see, you need to specify each column in the mapping file - which is slightly inconvenient I suppose.

The book Pro JPA 2 : Mastering the Java Persistence API notes:

The metadata-complete attribute is an attribute on the entity, mapped-superclass, and embeddable elements. If specified, all annotations on the specified class and on any fields or properties in the class will be ignored, and only the metadata in the mapping file will be considered as the set of metadata for the class. When metadata-complete is enabled, the same rules that we applied to annotated entities will still apply when using XML-mapped entities. For example, the identifier must be mapped, and all relationships must be specified with their corresponding cardinality mappings inside the entity element.

So you will need an entry in your orm.xml like the below, adding other attributes as required.

 <entity-mappings>
    <entity class="examples.Foo" metadata-complete="true">
        <table name="NEW_FOO"/>
        <attributes>
            <id name="id"/>
        </attributes>
    </entity>
</entity-mappings>

Upvotes: 5

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