What does an underscore concatenated to a class name mean?

Question

I was reading the \"Dynamic, typesafe queries in JPA 2.0\" article and stumbled upon this example:

EntityManager em = ...
CriteriaBuilder qb = em.getCriteriaBuil         


        

Answer 1

That is the metamodel for the persistance. It is how you can do type safe JPA queries in Java. It allows queries to staticly check your queries because classBar_ describes your JPA Bar. In HQL, you can easily mistype a query and not know it until it is run.

So technically, the _ does not mean anything, but it is the convention used by JPA to name a metamodel class of a JPA persistent model class. Model_ is the metamodel of Model, and it provides the names of the queryable fields and their types.

Answer 2

I found this way to declare the metamodel in this article.

/**
 * A  meta model class used to create type safe queries from person
 * information.
 * @author Petri Kainulainen
 */
@StaticMetamodel(Person.class)
public class Person_ {
    public static volatile SingularAttribute<Person, String> lastName;
}