Private field in java annotations

Question

My jboss seam application compile in eclipse without error. When I try to compile manually I have had a error

STATE_QUERY has private access

Answer 1

This doesn't exactly answer the question but I don't really see the point of using a constant for the query itself. I would just use something like this:

@Entity
@NamedQuery(name = Customer.FIND_ALL, query="select c from Customer c"),
public class Customer {
    public static final String FIND_ALL = "Customer.findAll";
    // Attributes, constructors, getters, setters
}

And the constant is public because... I want to be able to use it to execute queries:

Query query = em.createNamedQuery(Customer.FIND_ALL);
List customers = query.getResultList();

Using a constant for the name of the query makes sense because you'll refer to it from several places (from the @NamedQuery annotation, when invoking the query) and a constant makes your code more robust: it will resist to typing mistakes and refactoring. The advantages are obvious.

However, I personally don't see any real advantage in using a constant for the query itself.