How to match a CriteriaBuilder Predicate with a given Entity? - criteria-api

In my use case I have the following setup: A Contract has a Person and a Provider associated. Therefore the contract has a foreign key on the persons table and the providers table. So in CriteriaApi I made a join over Contract and Person and Provider:
Root<Contract> contract = ...
Join <Contract, Person> person = contract.join(Person.class);
Join <Contract, Provider> provider = contract.join(Provider.class);
Building predicates which check for certain values in a person works perfectly well, e.g.
cb.like(person.get(Person_.lastname), lastname);
For the provider the situation is different because I already have the ProviderEntity to join on. But I did not find a way to tell CriteriaApi something in the way of
cb.is(provider.get(Provider_), provider);
It seems kind of stupid to search for the provider based on some field if I already have the Entity including the primary key (which in turn is not mapped in Provider_).
Since I'm working in the context of Spring Data I can only define the Specification and not the full query, by the way. :-)

Ok, maybe I should just delete the question because I realized how stupid it is. I will leave it for now so somebody might learn from it :-)
Instead of building the Predicate on the Join I can just do it on the Root like
cb.equal(contract.get(Contract_.provider), provider);

Related

How to have a User Account for different entities in Spring JPA?

I'm making a system (using Spring + JPA with MySQL) that shows the best applicants for a certain job offer. The company and the applicants have their respective user account, and with that, they can fill in their personal/company information and their job profile/job offer conditions. With that, the system should match the job conditions (like 3+ years of experience in C) with the applicant's job profile.
My problem is that the User Account is created first, and should be independent, but these two different entities (Applicant and Company), with different attributes, are using it. So if I do something like create an applicant and company in the User Account, one of them will be always null.
How can I solve this? I guess the problem would be something like: how to implement a user account that can hold data from different entities that have different attributes (therefore, can't be grouped)? (In fact, I need one more entity, but I tried to simplify it to illustrate the problem more clearly).
I think, you should make marker interface, like public interface UserAccountable or smth. Implement this interface in your Applicant and Company classes. Then you can make a field in UserAccount class, like private UserAccountable someUser; and throught setters and getters you can assign and get this variable to Applicant or Company.
Hope this helps!
I found what I needed here: https://thoughts-on-java.org/complete-guide-inheritance-strategies-jpa-hibernate/
The problem was the mapping, not the class design per se. I could create interfaces and abstract classes to solve it in the Java world, but in the SQL world that's not possible, so the mapping is the key. In this case, I was looking for the Joined table mapping, but I realized I needed it just to not have null fields in my UserAccount, because I don't need a polymorphic query (e.g. give me the names of every 'user type' (Person, Company)), and it would be too costly performance wise to implement it that way, so I'll trade off space for performance, and I'll just reference all three user types in the User Account, leaving two of those three fields null forever.
PS: Single table mapping won't help because I do need to use not null conditions.

how to do AND and multiple OR parameters method in spring data JPA

I am trying to formulate a method name for this query :
#Query("from Employees where department = ?1 and (fullTime = true or contractor = true or subContractor = true)")
I thought this method will do the trick, but it does an and on dept and full time
public List<Employees> findByDepartmentAndfullTimeTrueOrContractorTrueOrSubContractorTrue(String dept);
This is a related question : Spring JPA Data "OR" query but was asked in 2012. Is there a way to achieve this without having to use #Query ?
This is currently not supported and probably never will be for a very simple reason:
Derived queries are considered a means to define very simple queries. I admit this is blurry but if you get to findByDepartmentAndfullTimeTrueOrContractorTrueOrSubContractorTrue it's time to rethink whether that's actually what you want to expose to clients. It's awkward to write, awkward to read and probably actually more than a collection of predicates but conveying a higher-level meaning and thus should be named in amore descriptive way.
The solution - as you already discovered - is to use #Query or Querydsl predicates.

Hibernate: Child table having two different ManyToOne relationships

In the Spring/Hibernate/Java/Tomcat app I'm writing I have a OneToMany relationship between an Organization and its Contacts.
Organization 1:M Contact (has foreign key org_id)
In Organization I have this field:
#OneToMany(mappedBy="organization")
private List<Contact> contacts;
In Contact I have this field:
#ManyToOne
#JoinColumn(name="org_id")
private Organization organization;
All is working OK so far. Now I'm adding the concept of an Offer. The Offer can be made by an Organization, and you speak with the designated Contact for that particular Offer.
Offer has foreign keys for its organization (org_id) and designated contact (contact_id).
So far, the Offer would look like:
#OneToOne
#JoinColumn(...)
private Organization offering_org;
#OneToOne
#JoinColumn(...)
private Contact offering_contact;
Here comes the point of my question. I've already annotated the Contact class for use with Organization. If I try to persist the Offer object in the usual Hibernate way, I'll need to store copies of an Organization object and a Contact object into the Offer object. This seems to conflict with my existing Organization : Contact use of the two Java classes. For example, if I've a 1:1 with Offer, if I put this into the Contact class do I get an optional use of either or a mandatory simultaneous use of both?
Since the Offer is yet another relationship, do I need to write a data transfer object version of Contact for use in the Offer relationship?
Thanks,
Jerome.
Perhaps I do not fully understand the problem but I'd just do something like this:
// contact & organization being already persisted entity objects
Offer offer = new Offer();
offer.setOffering_org(organization);
offer.setOffering_contact(contact);
// Persisting the new Offer object to the database,
// implicitly making the relations.
service.saveObject(offer);
I see no reason to create copy(s) of the organization object?
It just happens to be that the collection of "contacts" in the Organization object can also be a Contact within one or more Offer objects.
I'm thinking that my original question is kind of stupid. What I did try is to put this in Offer.java:
#Column(name="org_id")
private Long orgId = null;
#Column(name="contact_id")
private Long contactId = null;
I fill orgId manually because an offer is always tied to the user's Organization. It is a hidden field in the web page.
I put a SELECT filled with appropriate Contact objects (contact.id, contact.name) in the web page.
When the web page is submitted the Offer's orgId and contactId fields are filled in the #ModelAttribute parameter. This takes me where I want to go.
To address the comments of Mr. mspringer, your example could work (you illustrated a "create new" situation) if I were willing to use an Organization or Contact list in my Offer object. It is also somewhat the topic of my original question. But since I see that I don't really want to play with the expanded objects within Offer, nor do I wish to, I can avoid the topic of my original question.
Thanks to all who looked at my exercise in confusion.

Linq doubts with DB context

Hi I have a question that is braking my mind for some days.
I have my SQL server Database and my C# application.
In the DB I have differemt tables, let me show you a simple ex
Tables:
Person
Relationship
City
Business Rules:
The person are from a City, so the person has IdCity
A person has a relationship with other person, and about that relationship you need to save the starting date.
In other projects I already did something like that, but in this proyect this is not working for me.
When I retrieved with LinQ the information about the person, the city is not coming, and an error appears when I try "person.city.description", for ex.
I try using Include("City") in the linq query, but it didn't work. Besides that, I don't know how to manage the circular reference to the person to person relationship.
One important thing, that I think that can be the problem, is that I rename all the tables from the DataModel, for example, the table in database is called Prd_City, so I change the Name and the Entity Set Name for City in c# project. So in the included I have to use the real table name, in other case the query fail, but if I use the real name nothing happens.
using (var context = new MyContext())
{
List<Person> oPeople = (from p in context.Person.Include("Prd_City")
select p).ToList();
return oPeople ;
}
Any help will be welcome.
Thanks!
"It didn't work" is never a good description of your problem. But from the rest of your question I can infer that Person has a navigation property named "Prd_City", while you expected it to be "City". The thing is: you renamed the entities, but not the navigation properties in the entities.
My advice (for what it's worth): it seems that your work database-first. If you can, change to code-first and manually map the POCO classes to their table names, and properties to their database columns. It may be a considerable amount of work (depending on the size of your data model), but after that you will never run the risk of EF "un-renaming" your entities. Besides, the DbContext API is easier to use than ObjectContext. Currently, it's the preferred EF API.

LINQ to SQL Lookup table? Join perhaps? I'm lost... ;/

Not sure if this is called a lookup table... Here's a screenshot of the schema: http://apoads.com/db-schema.png
What I want to do is join the Ad and MilBase table where the MilBase.BaseID is a given value. In the result, I'd like to be able to access the data like so: ad.MilBase.BaseName, etc...
I just can't seem to wrap my mind around this right now... ;/
Your problem is that your schema has the semantics of a many-to-many relationship between Ad and MilBase and as such the really desired way you would be wanting to do this in LINQ would be ad.Milbases which would then hold a Collection of Milbases.
The problem is not made any better by the fact that LINQ To SQL does not support many-to-many relationships directly, and in reality (assuming that your lookup table only defines a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship) you'd have to do something like
ad.Adbases.Single().MilBase
Of course assuming there will always be one - if that's not the case, then you've got some more complicated things ahead of you.
Of course a join is also always possible too - either way - if this is not the information you were looking for, could you clarify the relationship between Ad and Milbase? (many-to-many, etc?). Also - if this is not a many-to-many and you are able to do so, I would really change this to be a foreign key in either Milbase or the Ad table.
EDIT: In response to your comment,
You could do something like
var query = from a in db.ad
select new {
a.property1,
a.property2,
...
Milbases = a.Adbases.Select(s => s.Milbase)
};
Obviously that code won't compile, but it should give you a rough idea - also I'm certain it can be done in better ways, but something like that should work.

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