Use of Embeddable annotation

[Joe San]

Guys,

I'm trying to fully understand this annotation. From what I read from the Pro EJB 3 book is that for an user entity when we have the address information in the user itself, then we could very well make it as a seperate entity and mark it as embedabble and use this entity in the user. But normally we model the aaddress class as a seperate entity as it will be a physical table representation in the database. So this example does not justifies to me the need for Embeddable. Can anyone here help me with a better example?

[Hong Anderson]

For example, you can have Name class.

public Name {
private firstName;
private middleName;
private lastName;
....
}

[Ravi Kiran Savirigana]

hi...
What i think is you use @Embeddable annotation to designate persistent objects that need
not have an identity(something like a primary key in DB scenario) of their own. They are simply used as convenient data holders/groupings.(Am i correct..?)

[Joe San]

Ravi Kiran Savirigana wrote:hi...
What i think is you use @Embeddable annotation to designate persistent objects that need
not have an identity(something like a primary key in DB scenario) of their own. They are simply used as convenient data holders/groupings.(Am i correct..?)

Yes, this looks like a valid point to me. But there is another scenario where in you use this annotation. When you have to represent an Id class....which looks totally in contrary to what you said (data holders/groupings not have an identity...). What I feel is the real use of this class is like reusable chunk of a POJO that I can use across multiple entities and override the defaults (using @AttributeOverrides...) as and when needed.

[Jiafan Zhou]

But there is another scenario where in you use this annotation. When you have to represent an Id class....which looks totally in contrary to what you said (data holders/groupings not have an identity...). What I feel is the real use of this class is like reusable chunk of a POJO that I can use across multiple entities and override the defaults (using @AttributeOverrides...) as and when needed.

I think that the @Embeddable class itself is ignorant of whether it is used as Properties or Id. From this point of view, it is simply served as a data holders/groupings. How this grouping is used (either ID by @EmbeddedId or properties by @Embedded) is dependant on the "consumer" of the Embeddable class.