Question

I have a one-to-one relationship but hibernatetool complains when generating the schema. Here’s an example that shows the problem:

@Entity
public class Person {
    @Id
    public int id;

    @OneToOne
    public OtherInfo otherInfo;

    rest of attributes ...
}

Person has a one-to-one relationship with OtherInfo:

@Entity
public class OtherInfo {
    @Id
    @OneToOne(mappedBy="otherInfo")
    public Person person;

    rest of attributes ...
}

Person is owning side of OtherInfo. OtherInfo is the owned side so person uses mappedBy to specify the attribute name “otherInfo” in Person.

I get the following error when using hibernatetool to generate the database schema:

org.hibernate.MappingException: Could not determine type for: Person, at table: OtherInfo, for columns: [org.hibernate.mapping.Column(person)]
        at org.hibernate.mapping.SimpleValue.getType(SimpleValue.java:292)
        at org.hibernate.mapping.SimpleValue.createIdentifierGenerator(SimpleValue.java:175)
        at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.iterateGenerators(Configuration.java:743)
        at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.generateDropSchemaScript(Configuration.java:854)
        at org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaExport.<init>(SchemaExport.java:128)
        ...

Any idea why? Am I a doing something wrong or is this a Hibernate bug?

Answer 1

JPA doesn’t allow the @Id annotation on a OneToOne or ManyToOne mapping. What you are trying to do is one-to-one entity association with shared primary key. The simplest case is unidirectional one-to-one with shared key:

@Entity
public class Person {
    @Id
    private int id;

    @OneToOne
    @PrimaryKeyJoinColumn
    private OtherInfo otherInfo;

    rest of attributes ...
}

The main problem with this is that JPA provides no support for shared primary key generation in OtherInfo entity. The classic book Java Persistence with Hibernate by Bauer and King gives the following solution to the problem using Hibernate extension:

@Entity
public class OtherInfo {
    @Id @GeneratedValue(generator = "customForeignGenerator")
    @org.hibernate.annotations.GenericGenerator(
        name = "customForeignGenerator",
        strategy = "foreign",
        parameters = @Parameter(name = "property", value = "person")
    )
    private Long id;

    @OneToOne(mappedBy="otherInfo")
    @PrimaryKeyJoinColumn
    public Person person;

    rest of attributes ...
}

Also, see here.