The type of field isn't supported by declared persistence strategy “OneToMany”

Question

We are new to JPA and trying to setup a very simple one to many relationship where a pojo called Message can have a list of integer group id's defined by a join table called GROUP_ASSOC. Here is the DDL:

CREATE TABLE "APP"."MESSAGE" (
        "MESSAGE_ID" INTEGER NOT NULL GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY (START WITH 1, INCREMENT BY 1)
    );

ALTER TABLE "APP"."MESSAGE" ADD CONSTRAINT "MESSAGE_PK" PRIMARY KEY ("MESSAGE_ID");

CREATE TABLE "APP"."GROUP_ASSOC" (
        "GROUP_ID" INTEGER NOT NULL,
        "MESSAGE_ID" INTEGER NOT NULL
    );

ALTER TABLE "APP"."GROUP_ASSOC" ADD CONSTRAINT "GROUP_ASSOC_PK" PRIMARY KEY ("MESSAGE_ID", "GROUP_ID");

ALTER TABLE "APP"."GROUP_ASSOC" ADD CONSTRAINT "GROUP_ASSOC_FK" FOREIGN KEY ("MESSAGE_ID")
    REFERENCES "APP"."MESSAGE" ("MESSAGE_ID");

Here is the pojo:

@Entity
@Table(name = "MESSAGE")
public class Message {
    @Id
    @Column(name = "MESSAGE_ID")
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    private int messageId;

    @OneToMany(fetch=FetchType.LAZY, cascade=CascadeType.PERSIST)
    private List groupIds;

    public int getMessageId() {
        return messageId;
    }
    public void setMessageId(int messageId) {
        this.messageId = messageId;
    }
    public List getGroupIds() {
        return groupIds;
    }
    public void setGroupIds(List groupIds) {
        this.groupIds = groupIds;
    }
}

I know this is wrong as there is no @Column mapping to GROUP_ASSOC.GROUP_ID for the groupIds property, but hopefully this illustrates what we are trying to do. When we run the following test code we get <openjpa-1.2.3-SNAPSHOT-r422266:907835 fatal user error> org.apache.openjpa.util.MetaDataException: The type of field "pojo.Message.groupIds" isn't supported by declared persistence strategy "OneToMany". Please choose a different strategy.

Message msg = new Message();
List groups = new ArrayList();
groups.add(101);
groups.add(102);
EntityManager em = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("TestDBWeb").createEntityManager();
em.getTransaction().begin();
em.persist(msg);
em.getTransaction().commit();

Help!

Answer 1

When you are working with JPA, you should think Object and relations between Objects and you should map your Object model, not ids, to your relational model (it is possible to map a List of basic values with @ElementCollection in JPA 2.0 though but what I said just before still applies).

Here, (assuming this really is a one-to-many relation between Message and GroupAssoc and not a many-to-many relation between Message and Group entities) you should have something like this:

@Entity
@Table(name = "MESSAGE")
public class Message implements Serializable {
    @Id
    @Column(name = "MESSAGE_ID")
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)    
    private Long messageId;

    @OneToMany(fetch=FetchType.LAZY, cascade=CascadeType.PERSIST)    
    private List<GroupAssoc> groupAssocs = new ArrayList<GroupAssoc>();

    public Long getMessageId() {
        return messageId;
    }
    public void setMessageId(Long messageId) {
        this.messageId = messageId;
    }

    public List<GroupAssoc> getGroupAssocs() {
        return groupAssocs;
    }
    public void setGroupAssocs(List<GroupAssoc> groupAssocs) {
        this.groupAssocs = groupAssocs;
    }

    // equals() and hashCode()
}

And another entity for GroupAssoc.

PS: Your DDL really looks like a (M:N) relation between MESSAGE and GROUP (or I don't understand the PK constraint of GROUP_ASSOC) but you didn't show any FK constraint on GROUP_ID so I'm not 100% sure. But if that's the case, then you should use an @ManyToMany instead of @OneToMany.