@OrderBy not working properly in JPA

Question

How does @OrderBy work?

It is not working here in the following code:

Employee.java

package com.semanticbits.po         


        

Answer 1

I think you're misunderstanding what the @Orderby annotation actually does. According to the javadoc:

Specifies the ordering of the elements of a collection valued association or element collection at the point when the association or collection is retrieved.

[emphasis added] The annotation does not dictate insertion order. Continuing with your example, if you were to fetch an Employee:

Employee employee = manager.find(Employee.class, employeeId);
List<Address> addresses = employee.getAddress(); 

Then addresses would be sorted by city in descending order.

Answer 2

according to the spec you would have to use:

@OrderBy("address.city DESC")