Hibernate JPA Sequence (non-Id)

Is it possible to use a DB sequence for some column that is not the identifier/is not part of a composite identifier?

I'm using hibernate as jpa provider, and I have a table that has some columns that are generated values (using a sequence), although they are not part of the identifier.

What I want is to use a sequence to create a new value for an entity, where the column for the sequence is NOT (part of) the primary key:

@Entity
@Table(name = "MyTable")
public class MyEntity {

    //...
    @Id //... etc
    public Long getId() {
        return id;
    }

   //note NO @Id here! but this doesn't work...
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO, generator = "myGen")
    @SequenceGenerator(name = "myGen", sequenceName = "MY_SEQUENCE")
    @Column(name = "SEQ_VAL", unique = false, nullable = false, insertable = true, updatable = true)
    public Long getMySequencedValue(){
      return myVal;
    }

}

Then when I do this:

em.persist(new MyEntity());

the id will be generated, but the mySequenceVal property will be also generated by my JPA provider.

Just to make things clear: I want Hibernate to generate the value for the mySequencedValue property. I know Hibernate can handle database-generated values, but I don't want to use a trigger or any other thing other than Hibernate itself to generate the value for my property. If Hibernate can generate values for primary keys, why can't it generate for a simple property?

Solution 1:

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;
}

Solution 2:

I found that @Column(columnDefinition="serial") works perfect but only for PostgreSQL. For me this was perfect solution, because second entity is "ugly" option.

A call to saveAndFlush on the entity is also necessary, and save won't be enough to populate the value from the DB.

Solution 3:

I know this is a very old question, but it's showed firstly upon the results and jpa has changed a lot since the question.

The right way to do it now is with the @Generated annotation. You can define the sequence, set the default in the column to that sequence and then map the column as:

@Generated(GenerationTime.INSERT)
@Column(name = "column_name", insertable = false)