Hi Andy, thanks for the quick response.
In my application i had three tables generated (a master, a detail and a
join table) for what i believed could be modelled by just the master and a
detail table (at least in traditional database modeling). So when i was
looking for a solution to simplify my datamodel in the database, i found
this posting which looked similar to my problem and added my question.
I need to map the following Java classes (note i reuse Marco's code
example):
@MappedSuperclass
@Inheritance(strategy=InheritanceType.TABLE_PER_CLASS)
class ModelObject {
@Id
private int id
@Transient
ModelObject parent;
@OneToMany(cascade={CascadeType.ALL}, fetch=FetchType.EAGER)
List<ModelObject> children;
.....
}
@Entity
class Company extends ModelObject {
}
@Entity
class Employer extends ModelObject {
}
to the folowing database tables:
COMPANY
(ID (PK)
, ...
)
and EMPLOYEE
(ID (PK)
,COMPANY_ID (FK to COMPANY.ID)
, ...
)
In Marco's original question he indicates that in his case "openjpa create 4
tables (Company,
Company_children, Emplpyer and Employer_children).".
Your solution (anotate "ModelObject parent;" with @ManyToOne instead of
@Transient and add mappedBy="parent" to @OneToMany) works, also for my
application, but turns the uni-directional relation into a bi-directional
relation.
And this bi-directional relation is more dificult to manage and not needed
in our Java application. It does however results in a simpler datamodel.
Your second solution changes the direction (or ownership) of the relation in
the Java model.
So it seems we have to trade a simplified database datamodel versus a
simplified Java datamodel.
Or is there an other solution?
thanks,
Uden
hazen wrote:
>
> Hi Uden,
>
> If you'd rather keep the relation unidirectional just remove the
> `children` field-- the `parent` field alone is enough to encode the
> relation without recourse to a separate join table. Either way, I don't
> see how the quoted section below results in a join table. Both fields
> rely solely on a "parent_id" column within the "ModelObject" table, not
> on some other join table. Am I missing something?
>
> Andy
>
> Uden wrote:
>> The solution quoted below but has a consequence for the Java class model:
>> the
>> OneToMany relationship becomes bi-directional instead of uni-directional.
>>
>> What is the reason for creating the join-table?
>>
>> I thought (based on my database experience) that a join-table is only
>> required for ManyToMany relationships.
>> If you look at the data in the join-table of a uni-directional relation
>> (no
>> mappedBy attribute), the relation between the join-table and master table
>> is
>> always OneToOne, so this relation could be handled by a FK-field in the
>> detail-table.
>>
>> thanks for your explanation,
>> Uden
>>
>>
>> Andy Schlaikjer-2 wrote:
>>> Marco Schwarz wrote:
>>>> How can I make only 2 tables?
>>> Here's my guess:
>>>
>>> First, use the "mappedBy" property of the @OneToMany annotation, like
>>> this:
>>>
>>> @Entity
>>> class ModelObject {
>>> ...
>>>
>>> @ManyToOne
>>> ModelObject parent;
>>>
>>> @OneToMany(mappedBy="parent")
>>> List<ModelObject> children;
>>>
>>> ...
>>> }
>>>
>>> This way, an extra join table won't be necessary to encode the parent
>>> child relationship. Only the "parent_id" column in the "ModelObject"
>>> table will be used to encode the relationship.
>>>
>>
>
>
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