JPA - Entity design problem

Posted by Yatendra Goel on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Yatendra Goel
Published on 2010-04-01T18:38:36Z Indexed on 2010/04/01 18:43 UTC
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I am developing a Java Desktop Application and using JPA for persistence. I have a problem mentioned below:

I have two entities:

  • Country
  • City

Country has the following attribute:

  • CountryName (PK)

City has the following attribute:

  • CityName

Now as there can be two cities with same name in two different countries, the primaryKey for City table in the datbase is a composite primary key composed of CityName and CountryName.

Now my question is How to implement the primary key of the City as an Entity in Java

   @Entity
   public class Country implements Serializable {
       private String countryName;

       @Id
       public String getCountryName() {
           return this.countryName;
       }
   }

  @Entity
  public class City implements Serializable {
           private CityPK cityPK;
           private Country country;

           @EmbeddedId
           public CityPK getCityPK() {
               return this.cityPK;
           }
   }


   @Embeddable
   public class CityPK implements Serializable {
       public String cityName;
       public String countryName;
   }

Now as we know that the relationship from Country to City is OneToMany and to show this relationship in the above code, I have added a country variable in City class.

But then we have duplicate data(countryName) stored in two places in the City class: one in the country object and other in the cityPK object.

But on the other hand, both are necessary:

  • countryName in cityPK object is necessary because we implement composite primary keys in this way.

  • countryName in country object is necessary because it is the standard way of showing relashionship between objects.

How to get around this problem?

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