Question

I tried running this statement in Postgres:

insert into field (id, name) values (DEFAULT, 'Me')

and I got this error:

ERROR: null value in column "id" violates not-null constraint

I ended up having to manually set the id. The problem with that is when my app inserts a record I get a duplicate key error. I am building a java app using Play framework and ebean ORM. So the entire schema is generated automatically by ebean. In this case, what is the best practice for inserting a record manually into my db?

Edit:
Here is how I’m creating my Field class

@Entity
public class Field {
    @id
    public Long id;
    public String name;
}

Edit:
I checked the field_seq sequence and it looks like this:

CREATE SEQUENCE public.field_seq INCREMENT BY 1 MINVALUE 1 MAXVALUE 9223372036854775807 START 1 CACHE 1; 

Edit:
Here is the generated SQL in pgAdmin III:

CREATE TABLE field
(
  id bigint NOT NULL,
  created timestamp without time zone,
  modified timestamp without time zone,
  name character varying(255),
  enabled boolean,
  auto_set boolean,
  section character varying(17),
  input_type character varying(8),
  user_id bigint,
  CONSTRAINT pk_field PRIMARY KEY (id),
  CONSTRAINT fk_field_user_3 FOREIGN KEY (user_id)
      REFERENCES account (id) MATCH SIMPLE
      ON UPDATE NO ACTION ON DELETE NO ACTION,
  CONSTRAINT ck_field_input_type CHECK (input_type::text = ANY (ARRAY['TEXT'::character varying, 'TEXTAREA'::character varying]::text[])),
  CONSTRAINT ck_field_section CHECK (section::text = ANY (ARRAY['MAIN_CONTACT_INFO'::character varying, 'PARTICIPANT_INFO'::character varying]::text[]))
);

CREATE INDEX ix_field_user_3
  ON field
  USING btree
  (user_id);

Answer 1

This works.

insert into field (id, name) values (nextval('field_seq'), "Me");