How to join tables on non Primary Key using JPA and Hibernate

Question

I have 3 models User, House, UserHouseMap. And I need to access a user's house through the map. Only problem is this is an old DB & I can't change the fact that I need to map User to UserHouseMap using user.name, which is a non primary key.

Hibernate keeps giving me errors saying I need to have it as the primary key or I get errors saying A JPA error occurred (Unable to build EntityManagerFactory): Unable to find column with logical name: name in org.hibernate.mapping.Table(users) and its related supertables and secondary tables

I have tried @Formula as a workaround, but that didnt work. I also tried @JoinColumnOrFormula but that didnt work either. Here is my solution with @Formula

@Expose
@ManyToOne(targetEntity = House.class)
@Formula("(select * from houses inner join user_house_map on houses.house_name = user_house_map.house_name where user_house_map.user_name=name)")
public House house;

Here was my attempt at a @JoinColumnOrFormula solution.

@Expose
@ManyToOne(targetEntity = House.class)
@JoinColumnsOrFormulas({
        @JoinColumnOrFormula(formula=@JoinFormula(value="select name from users where users.id= id", referencedColumnName="name")),
        @JoinColumnOrFormula(column = @JoinColumn(name= "house_name", referencedColumnName="house_name"))
})
public House house;

Here is my mapping

@Id
@GeneratedValue
@Expose
public Long id;

@Expose
@Required
@ManyToOne
@JoinTable(
        name="user_house_map",
        joinColumns=
        @JoinColumn(unique=true,name="user_name", referencedColumnName="name"),
        inverseJoinColumns=
        @JoinColumn(name="house_name", referencedColumnName="house_name"))
private House house;

Here are the DB schemas

Users

                               Table "public.users"
        Column         |            Type             |          Modifiers          
-----------------------+-----------------------------+-----------------------------
 name                  | character varying(255)      |
 id                    | integer                     | not null 
Indexes:
    "user_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id)
Foreign-key constraints:
    "housing_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (name) REFERENCES user_house_map(user_name) DEFERRABLE INITIALLY DEFERRED

Houses

                Table "public.houses"
    Column     |          Type          | Modifiers 
---------------+------------------------+-----------
 house_name    | character varying(255) | not null
 address       | text                   | 
 city          | text                   | 
 state         | text                   | 
 zip           | integer                | 
 zip_ext       | integer                | 
 phone         | text                   | 
Indexes:
    "house_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (house_name)
Referenced by:
    TABLE "user_house_map" CONSTRAINT "house_map_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (house_name) REFERENCES house(house_name) DEFERRABLE INITIALLY DEFERRED

UserHouseMap

         Table "public.user_house_map"
   Column    |          Type          | Modifiers 
-------------+------------------------+-----------
 user_name   | character varying(255) | not null
 house_name  | character varying(255) | not null
Indexes:
    "user_house_map_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (user_name)
    "user_house_map_house_key" btree (house_name)
Foreign-key constraints:
    "user_house_map_house_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (house_name) REFERENCES houses(house_name) DEFERRABLE INITIALLY DEFERRED
Referenced by:
    TABLE "users" CONSTRAINT "housing_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (name) REFERENCES user_house_map(user_name) DEFERRABLE INITIALLY DEFERRED

Solution

This is how your mapping should look like:

@Entity
public class User {

    @Id
    private Long id;

    private String name;

    @OneToMany(mappedBy = "user")
    private List<UserHouseMap> houses = new ArrayList<>();
}

@Entity
public class House {

    @Id
    @Column(name = "house_name", nullable = false, unique = true) 
    private String house_name;

    private String address;

    @OneToMany(mappedBy = "house")
    private List<UserHouseMap> users = new ArrayList<>();
}

@Entity
public class UserHouseMap implements Serializable {

    @Id @ManyToOne
    @JoinColumn(name = "user_name", referencedColumnName = "name")
    private User user;

    @Id @ManyToOne
    @JoinColumn(name = "house_name", referencedColumnName = "house_name")
    private House house;
}

Both User and House have access to their associated UserHouseMap entities, matching the database schema.

Comments

[Kevin Vasko]

I know this is old but I had a hellva time with this same error. Your solution works, however I had to make a slight change but I had to add @Column(name = "name", nullable = false) private String name; If I had to take a guess as to why, my variable/property name is not the same as the column name as the database table. Just an FYI for anyone else that is having same/similar issues.

[Vlad Mihalcea]

Thanks. I added both nullable=false and unique=true, which must be enforced by any identifier column.

[Archi]

This won't work if user_name and house_name are non-primary keys!!