@OneToMany and composite primary keys?

Question

I\'m using Hibernate with annotations (in spring), and I have an object which has an ordered, many-to-one relationship which a child object which has a composite primary key

Answer 1

Found this question searching for the answer to it's problem, but it's answers didn't solve my problem, because I was looking for @OneToMany which isn't as good of a fit for the table structure I was going after. @ElementCollection is the right fit in my case. One of the gotchas of it I believe though is that it looks at the entire row of relations as being unique, not just the rows id.

@Entity
public class ParentObject {
@Column(nullable=false, updatable=false)
@Id @GeneratedValue(generator="...")
private String id;

@ElementCollection
@CollectionTable( name = "chidren", joinColumns = @JoinColumn( name = "parent_id" ) )
private List<ObjectChild> attrs;

...
}

@Embeddable
public static class ObjectChild implements Serializable {
    @Column(nullable=false, updatable=false)
    private String parentId;

    @Column(nullable=false, updatable=false)
    private String name;

    @Column(nullable=false, updatable=false)
    private int pos;

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return new Formatter().format("%s.%s[%d]", parentId, name, pos).toString();
    }

    ... getters and setters REQUIRED (at least they were for me)
}

Answer 2

After saving the Parent object, you have to explicitly set the parentId in the Child objects for the inserts on the Child objects to work.

Answer 3

Firstly, in the ParentObject, "fix" the mappedBy attribute that should be set to "parent". Also (but this is maybe a typo) add an @Id annotation:

@Entity
public class ParentObject {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    private String id;

    @OneToMany(mappedBy="parent", fetch=FetchType.EAGER)
    @IndexColumn(name = "pos", base=0)
    private List<ObjectChild> attrs;

    // getters/setters
}

Then, in ObjectChild, add a name attribute to the objectId in the composite key:

@Entity
public class ObjectChild {
    @Embeddable
    public static class Pk implements Serializable {
        @Column(name = "parentId", nullable = false, updatable = false)
        private String objectId;

        @Column(nullable = false, updatable = false)
        private String name;

        @Column(nullable = false, updatable = false)
        private int pos;
    }

    @EmbeddedId
    private Pk pk;

    @ManyToOne
    @JoinColumn(name = "parentId", insertable = false, updatable = false)
    private ParentObject parent;

    // getters/setters

}

AND also add insertable = false, updatable = false to the @JoinColumn because we are repeating the parentId column in the mapping of this entity.

With these changes, persisting and reading the entities is working fine for me (tested with Derby).