Java – JPA: ignore field on save, but fetch on select

hibernatejavajpa

I am using Hibernate as my JPA provider, and I want one of the fields in an entity to be ignored when calling save(). However, I do have a matching column in the corresponding database table and I want my entity field to be populated with the database value when I fetch the entity. So, I want the field to be ignored when saving the entity, but not when fetching it.

If I use @Transient, the field is completely ignored, which is not what I want. Is there any way to do this?

Best Solution

From the excellent book Pro JPA 2 :

JPA defines options to set individual mappings to be read-only using the insertable and updatable elements of the @Column and @JoinColumn annotations. These two settings default to true but can be set to false if we want to ensure that the provider will not insert or update information in the table in response to changes in the entity instance. If the data in the mapped table already exists and we want to ensure that it will not be modified at runtime, then the insertable and updatable elements can be set to false, effectively preventing the provider from doing anything other than reading the entity from the database.

@Column(insertable = false, updatable = false)
private String readOnlyField;

Related Solutions

Java – Hibernate JPA Sequence (non-Id)

Looking for answers to this problem, I stumbled upon this link

It seems that Hibernate/JPA isn't able to automatically create a value for your non-id-properties. The @GeneratedValue annotation is only used in conjunction with @Id to create auto-numbers.

The @GeneratedValue annotation just tells Hibernate that the database is generating this value itself.

The solution (or work-around) suggested in that forum is to create a separate entity with a generated Id, something like this:

@Entity
public class GeneralSequenceNumber {
  @Id
  @GeneratedValue(...)
  private Long number;
}

@Entity 
public class MyEntity {
  @Id ..
  private Long id;

  @OneToOne(...)
  private GeneralSequnceNumber myVal;
}

Java – JPA eager fetch does not join

JPA doesn't provide any specification on mapping annotations to select fetch strategy. In general, related entities can be fetched in any one of the ways given below

SELECT => one query for root entities + one query for related mapped entity/collection of each root entity = (n+1) queries
SUBSELECT => one query for root entities + second query for related mapped entity/collection of all root entities retrieved in first query = 2 queries
JOIN => one query to fetch both root entities and all of their mapped entity/collection = 1 query

So SELECT and JOIN are two extremes and SUBSELECT falls in between. One can choose suitable strategy based on her/his domain model.

By default SELECT is used by both JPA/EclipseLink and Hibernate. This can be overridden by using:

@Fetch(FetchMode.JOIN) 
@Fetch(FetchMode.SUBSELECT)

in Hibernate. It also allows to set SELECT mode explicitly using @Fetch(FetchMode.SELECT) which can be tuned by using batch size e.g. @BatchSize(size=10).

Corresponding annotations in EclipseLink are:

@JoinFetch
@BatchFetch

Best Solution

Related Solutions

Java – Hibernate JPA Sequence (non-Id)

Java – JPA eager fetch does not join

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