Retiring @Table

[gavinking]

The @Table annotation has been sort of semi-deprecated for a long time now, but it has a zombie second life as a way to specify certain things for secondary tables.

I would really like to fully-deprecate this thing, and eventually remove it, but I'm having trouble coming up with something elegant to replace it with.

Currently, its useful bits are:

• checkConstraint and comment
• fetch, inverse, and optional
• sqlInsert, sqlUpdate, and sqlDelete

and they're all only needed for secondary tables.

Now, I'm hoping to see JPA add check and comment directly to the JPA @Table and @SecondaryTable annotations but obviously that will take a while.

But the other things don't make sense for the standard.

Honestly the best thing I've come up with so far is to simply move these things to an @Secondary annotation:

public @interface Secondary {
	SecondaryTable table(); // maybe, or perhaps we just match them by order?

	Check check() default @ Check("");
	Comment comment() default @Comment("");

	FetchMode fetch() default FetchMode.JOIN;
	boolean inverse() default false;
	boolean optional() default true;

	SQLInsert sqlInsert() default @SQLInsert(sql="");
	SQLUpdate sqlUpdate() default @SQLUpdate(sql="");
	SQLDelete sqlDelete() default @SQLDelete(sql="");
}

but this really isn't all that different from @Table as it exists today. (Though the name is a lot better.)

[beikov]

Sounds like a good idea. I guess I'd prefer calling it SecondaryTableOptions or something like that though, and also have an optional String table() default "" which allows to match by index or name instead of SecondaryTable table().

[yrodiere]

I confirm that, at least from my outside perspective, @Secondary is a bit too generic and not very clear.

[gavinking]

Curiously, @Table(fetch=SELECT) does nothing in H6, and the guts of the underlying implementation was completely removed. (Though there was some stuff left lying around, and the annotation member was not deprecated!)

I've cleaned up the zombie code and deprecated this member.

[gavinking]

but this really isn't all that different from @Table as it exists today

Upon reflection, I don't want to add a big "container" annotation, so I would rather split this stuff out into smaller annotations. I'm going to begin by adding @SecondaryRow for the inverse and optional members.

[gavinking]

And I think I'll just add a table member to @SqlInsert and friends. It's stringly-typed, which I hate, but that's the case for the whole @SecondaryTable concept, so I think I can live with it here.

[gavinking]

That leaves @Check and @Comment, which I'm still not sure what to do with, unless JPA accepts my proposal for adding these directly to @SecondaryTable.

[beikov]

Seems to have been completed already as part of https://hibernate.atlassian.net/browse/HHH-15570, so I'll close this discussion.

[gavinking]

It's not really finished:

That leaves @Check and @Comment, which I'm still not sure what to do with, unless JPA accepts my proposal for adding these directly to @SecondaryTable.

[gavinking]

JPA has integrated my proposal, so this work is now finished.