Persisting a List of Integers with JPA?

Question

We have a pojo that needs to have a list of integers. As an example, I've created a Message pojo and would like to associate a list of groupIds (these ids need to be queried and displayed in the UI). So ideally, we would like to be able to do something like this:

Message msg = em.find(Message.class, 101);
List<Integer> groupIds = msg.getGroupIds();

I was under the impression that this would require only one pojo with JPA, but according to the discussion here, I need to create a second pojo because JPA works in terms of objects instead of primitive types.

From that discussion I've tried the following example code, but I get the error openjpa-1.2.3-SNAPSHOT-r422266:907835 fatal user error: org.apache.openjpa.util.MetaDataException: The type of field "pojo.Group.messageId" isn't supported by declared persistence strategy "ManyToOne". Please choose a different strategy.

DDL:

CREATE TABLE "APP"."MESSAGE" (
  "MESSAGE_ID" INTEGER NOT NULL GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY (START WITH 1, INCREMENT BY 1),
  "AUTHOR" CHAR(20) NOT NULL
 );

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");

POJOs:

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

    @OneToMany   
    private List<Group> groups = new ArrayList<Group>();

    @Column(name = "AUTHOR")
    private String author;

    // getters/setters ommitted
}    

@Entity
@IdClass(pojo.Group.GroupKey.class)
@Table(name = "GROUP_ASSOC")
public class Group {

 @Id
 @Column(name = "GROUP_ID")
 private Long groupId;

 @Id
 @Column(name = "MESSAGE_ID")
 @ManyToOne
 private Long messageId;

 public static class GroupKey {
  public Long groupId;
  public Long messageId;

  public boolean equals(Object obj) {
   if(obj == this) return true;
            if(!(obj instanceof Group)) return false;
   Group g = (Group) obj;
   return g.getGroupId() == groupId && g.getMessageId() == messageId; 
  }

  public int hashCode() {
            return ((groupId == null) ? 0 : groupId.hashCode())
                ^ ((messageId == null) ? 0 : messageId.hashCode());
  } 
 }

 // getters/setters ommitted 
}

Test Code:

EntityManager em = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("JPATest").createEntityManager();
em.getTransaction().begin();

Message msg = new Message();
msg.setAuthor("Paul");
em.persist(msg);
List<Group> groups = new ArrayList<Group>();

Group g1 = new Group();
g1.setMessageId(msg.getMessageId());
Group g2 = new Group();
g2.setMessageId(msg.getMessageId());

msg.setGroups(groups);
em.getTransaction().commit();

This all seems ridiculous -- 3 classes (if you include the GroupKey composite identity class) to model a list of integers -- isn't there a more elegant solution?

Answer 1

I really think that what you have is in fact a many-to-many association between two Entities (let's call them Message and Group).

The DDL to represent this would be:

CREATE TABLE "APP"."MESSAGE" (
  "MESSAGE_ID" INTEGER NOT NULL GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY (START WITH 1, INCREMENT BY 1),
  "AUTHOR" CHAR(20) NOT NULL
 );

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

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

ALTER TABLE "APP"."GROUP" ADD CONSTRAINT "GROUP_PK" PRIMARY KEY ("GROUP_ID");

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

ALTER TABLE "APP"."MESSAGE_GROUP" ADD CONSTRAINT "MESSAGE_GROUP_PK" PRIMARY KEY ("MESSAGE_ID", "GROUP_ID");

ALTER TABLE "APP"."MESSAGE_GROUP" ADD CONSTRAINT "MESSAGE_GROUP_FK1" FOREIGN KEY ("MESSAGE_ID")
 REFERENCES "APP"."MESSAGE" ("MESSAGE_ID");

ALTER TABLE "APP"."MESSAGE_GROUP" ADD CONSTRAINT "MESSAGE_GROUP_FK2" FOREIGN KEY ("GROUP_ID")
 REFERENCES "APP"."MESSAGE" ("GROUP_ID");

And the annotated classes:

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

    @ManyToMany
    @JoinTable(
        name = "MESSAGE_GROUP", 
        joinColumns = @JoinColumn(name = "MESSAGE_ID"), 
        inverseJoinColumns = @JoinColumn(name = "GROUP_ID")
    ) 
    private List<Group> groups = new ArrayList<Group>();

    private String author;

    //...
}    

@Entity
public class Group {    
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    @Column(name = "GROUP_ID")
    private Long groupId;

    @ManyToMany(mappedBy = "groups")
    private List<Message> messages = new ArrayList<Message>();

    //...
}

I'm not sure you need a bi-directional association though. But you definitely need to start to think object if you want to use JPA (in you're example, you're still setting ids, you should set Entities). Or maybe JPA is not what you need.

---

isn't there a more elegant solution?

I'm not sure "elegant" is appropriate but JPA 2.0 defines an ElementCollection mapping (as I said in my previous answer):

It is meant to handle several non-standard relationship mappings. An ElementCollection can be used to define a one-to-many relationship to an Embeddable object, or a Basic value (such as a collection of Strings).

But that's in JPA 2.0. In JPA 1.0, you would have to use a provider specific equivalent, if your provider does offer such an extension. It appears that OpenJPA does with @PersistentCollection.

Answer 2

This is an old topic but things have changed since OpenJPA2, now you can directly persist primitive types or String object. Use ElementCollection annotation to use simple one-to-many linking, no need to intermediate object or link tables. This is how most of us probably create SQL schemas.

@Entity @Table(name="user") @Access(AccessType.FIELD)
public class User {
    @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    private long id;    // primary key (autogen surrogate)
    private String name;

    // ElementCollection provides simple OneToMany linking.
    // joinColumn.name=foreign key in child table. Column.name=value in child table
    @ElementCollection(fetch=FetchType.LAZY)
    @CollectionTable(name="user_role", joinColumns={@JoinColumn(name="user_id")})
    @Column(name="role")
    private List<String> roles;

    public long getId() { return id; }
    public void setId(long id) { this.id = id; }

    public String getName() { return name; }
    public void setName(String name) { this.name=name; }

    public List<String> getRoles() { return roles; }
    public void setRoles(List<String> roles) { this.roles=roles; }

}
- - -
CREATE TABLE user (
  id bigint NOT NULL auto_increment,
  name varchar(64) NOT NULL default '',
  PRIMARY KEY (id),
  UNIQUE KEY USERNAME (name)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 ;

CREATE TABLE user_role (
  user_id bigint NOT NULL,
  role varchar(64) NOT NULL default '',
  PRIMARY KEY (user_id, role)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 ;

Answer 3

Based on your schema you have a ManyToOne relationship between Group and Message. Which means that a single Message can belong to multiple groups, but each group can have a single message.

The entities would look something like this.

@Entity
@Table(name = "GROUP_ASSOC")
public class Group {
    @Id
    @Column(name="GROUP_ID")
    private int id;

    @ManyToOne
    @Column(name="MESSAGE_ID")
    @ForeignKey
    private Message message;

    // . . . 
}

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

    @Column(length=20)
    private String author;

    @OneToMany(mappedBy="message")  
    private Collection<Group> groups;
}

There's no need for an IDClass in your app (you only need one if your ID is contains multiple columns).

To get the groupIds for a given message you could write a query like this one

    Query q =  em.createQuery("Select g.id from Group g where g.message.id = :messageId");
    q.setParameter("messageId", 1);

    List results = q.getResultList();

Or just iterate over Message.getGroups() :

Message m = em.find(Message.class, 1);
for(Group g : m.getGroups()) {
    // create a list, process the group whatever fits.
}