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Steve Kuo
Steve Kuo

Reputation: 63114

JPA Multiple Embedded fields

Is it possible for a JPA entity class to contain two embedded (@Embedded) fields? An example would be:

@Entity
public class Person {
    @Embedded
    public Address home;

    @Embedded
    public Address work;
}

public class Address {
    public String street;
    ...
}

In this case a Person can contain two Address instances - home and work. I'm using JPA with Hibernate's implementation. When I generate the schema using Hibernate Tools, it only embeds one Address. What I'd like is two embedded Address instances, each with its column names distinguished or pre-pended with some prefix (such as home and work). I know of @AttributeOverrides, but this requires that each attribute be individually overridden. This can get cumbersome if the embedded object (Address) gets big as each column needs to be individually overridden.

Upvotes: 92

Views: 48430

Answers (4)

Arjan Mels
Arjan Mels

Reputation: 278

In case you are using hibernate you can also use a different naming scheme which adds unique prefixes to columns for identical embedded fields. See Automatically Add a Prefix to Column Names for @Embeddable Classes

Upvotes: 2

ruediste
ruediste

Reputation: 2959

When using Eclipse Link, an alternative to using AttributeOverrides it to use a SessionCustomizer. This solves the issue for all entities in one go:

public class EmbeddedFieldNamesSessionCustomizer implements SessionCustomizer {

@SuppressWarnings("rawtypes")
@Override
public void customize(Session session) throws Exception {
    Map<Class, ClassDescriptor> descriptors = session.getDescriptors();
    for (ClassDescriptor classDescriptor : descriptors.values()) {
        for (DatabaseMapping databaseMapping : classDescriptor.getMappings()) {
            if (databaseMapping.isAggregateObjectMapping()) {
                AggregateObjectMapping m = (AggregateObjectMapping) databaseMapping;
                Map<String, DatabaseField> mapping = m.getAggregateToSourceFields();

                ClassDescriptor refDesc = descriptors.get(m.getReferenceClass());
                for (DatabaseMapping refMapping : refDesc.getMappings()) {
                    if (refMapping.isDirectToFieldMapping()) {
                        DirectToFieldMapping refDirectMapping = (DirectToFieldMapping) refMapping;
                        String refFieldName = refDirectMapping.getField().getName();
                        if (!mapping.containsKey(refFieldName)) {
                            DatabaseField mappedField = refDirectMapping.getField().clone();
                            mappedField.setName(m.getAttributeName() + "_" + mappedField.getName());
                            mapping.put(refFieldName, mappedField);
                        }
                    }

                }
            }

        }
    }
}

}

Upvotes: 6

Philihp Busby
Philihp Busby

Reputation: 4485

The generic JPA way to do it is with @AttributeOverride. This should work in both EclipseLink and Hibernate.

@Entity 
public class Person {
  @AttributeOverrides({
    @AttributeOverride(name="street",column=@Column(name="homeStreet")),
    ...
  })
  @Embedded public Address home;

  @AttributeOverrides({
    @AttributeOverride(name="street",column=@Column(name="workStreet")),
    ...
  })
  @Embedded public Address work;
  }

  @Embeddable public class Address {
    @Basic public String street;
    ...
  }
}

Upvotes: 90

Loki
Loki

Reputation: 30960

If you want to have the same embeddable object type twice in the same entity, the column name defaulting will not work: at least one of the columns will have to be explicit. Hibernate goes beyond the EJB3 spec and allows you to enhance the defaulting mechanism through the NamingStrategy. DefaultComponentSafeNamingStrategy is a small improvement over the default EJB3NamingStrategy that allows embedded objects to be defaulted even if used twice in the same entity.

From Hibernate Annotations Doc: http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/annotations/reference/en/html_single/#d0e714

Upvotes: 29

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