In many to many get only id instead of the whole object - spring

Question

public class Role {
#ManyToMany
#JoinTable(name = "user_to_role",
joinColumns = #JoinColumn(name = "role_id"),
inverseJoinColumns = #JoinColumn(name = "user_id",referencedColumnName = "id"))
private Set<User> users;
}
public class User {
#ManyToMany
#JoinTable(name = "user_to_role",
joinColumns = #JoinColumn(name = "user_id"),
inverseJoinColumns = #JoinColumn(name = "role_id"))
private Set<Role> roles;
}
I have a many to many relationship between the two classes. When calling role.getUsers(), I want to get only the user ids, the rest of the fields should be ignored, since there will be a lot of data and I don't want to load everything, How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

A straightforward way to do it would be to use a Criteria query, but to use it inside an Entity, you'd have to inject an EntityManager there, which is considered a bad practice. A better solution would be to create this query in a Service.
But if you still want to do it, then your getUsers method would look something like this:
public List<User> getUsers() {
Criteria cr = entityManager.createCriteria(User.class)
.setProjection(Projections.projectionList()
.add(Projections.property("id"), "id")
.setResultTransformer(Transformers.aliasToBean(User.class));
List<User> list = cr.list();
return list;
}
If you want to restrict your list, just use a Restrictions, like so: criteria.add(Restrictions.eq("id", yourRestrictedId))

Answer 2

Since you have mapped the entities User and Role using #ManyToMany relationship, you need to create a DAO/Service class to implement the business logic to filter only userIds and return the same.
This cannot be handled in your Model\Entity classes as it will defy the whole concept of Object-Relational mapping.
I can create the business logic using DAO for your example if you want but you will get 10's of blogs achieving the same.
For your reference,you can check my sample project here.