Many to Many inside Many to Many Table

Question

I have a Table Orders which contains a List of Products. For each of the Products corresponding to the specific Order I ne

Answer 1

This is actually a good question that is worth some research and experimenting. There are many ways to do the mapping. Coming up with a better design would actually depend on your application needs. But here is how I think would be an effective way to implement the mapping:

I'll have 3 separate entities for Order, Product and Address.

We will not implement the usual many-to-many relationship between the 2 entities, Order and Product, where each side has a collection of the other. Instead, I'll create another entity to represent the relationship between Order and Product, and let's name it ProductOrder. Here's how their relationships are mapped:

• Order has one-to-many relationship with ProductOrder.
• ProductOrder has many-to-one relationship with Order.
• Product has one-to-many relationship with ProductOrder.
• ProductOrder has many-to-one relationship with Product.

ProductOrder's primary key will be composed of the primary key of Order and primary key of Product - so this will be a composite key. Therefore we will need to use @IdClass to map composite keys.

Now, here's the trick to achieving the many-to-many within a many-to-many relationship:

ProductOrder has many-to-many relationship with Address.

See sample codes for each entity mentioned above:

ORDER ENTITY

@Entity
@Table(name = "ORDERS")
public class Order {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    @Column(name = "ORDER_ID")
    private Long id;

    private int quantity;

    @OneToMany(mappedBy = "order")
    private List<ProductOrder> productOrderList = new ArrayList<ProductOrder>();
...
}

---

PRODUCT ENTITY

@Entity
@Table(name="PRODUCT")
public class Product {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    @Column(name = "PRODUCT_ID")
    private Long id;

    private String name;

    @OneToMany(mappedBy = "product")
    private List<ProductOrder> productOrderList = new ArrayList<ProductOrder>();
...
}

---

ADDRESS ENTITY

@Entity
@Table(name="ADDRESS")
public class Address {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    @Column(name = "ADDRESS_ID")
    private Long id;

    private String state;

    @ManyToMany(mappedBy = "addressList")
    private List<ProductOrder> productOrderList = new ArrayList<ProductOrder>();
...
}

---

PRODUCTORDER ENTITY

@Entity
@Table(name="PRODUCT_ORDER")
@IdClass(ProductOrderId.class)
public class ProductOrder {

    @Id
    @ManyToOne
    @JoinColumn(name="ORDER_ID")
    private Order order;

    @Id
    @ManyToOne
    @JoinColumn(name="PRODUCT_ID")
    private Product product;

    @ManyToMany
    @JoinTable(name="PRODUCT_ORDER_ADDRESS",
            joinColumns={@JoinColumn(name="ORDER_ID", referencedColumnName="ORDER_ID"),
                    @JoinColumn(name="PRODUCT_ID", referencedColumnName="PRODUCT_ID")},
            inverseJoinColumns=@JoinColumn(name="ADDRESS_ID", referencedColumnName="ADDRESS_ID"))
    private List<Address> addressList = new ArrayList<Address>();
...
}

---

@IdClass for ProductOrder entity

public class ProductOrderId {

    private Long order;
    private Long product;
...
}

---

Here's a sample code for creating the entities and persisting them:

    EntityManager em = emf.createEntityManager();
    em.getTransaction().begin();

    Order order = new Order();
    order.setQuantity(10);
    em.persist(order);

    Product product = new Product();
    product.setName("Coffee");
    em.persist(product);

    Address address = new Address();
    address.setState("CA");
    em.persist(address);

    ProductOrder productOrder = new ProductOrder();
    productOrder.setOrder(order);
    productOrder.setProduct(product);

    productOrder.getAddressList().add(address);
    address.getProductOrderList().add(productOrder);

    em.persist(productOrder);

    em.getTransaction().commit();

---

Here's how the schema was generated in MySQL database:

Hibernate: 
    create table ADDRESS (
        ADDRESS_ID bigint not null auto_increment,
        state varchar(255),
        primary key (ADDRESS_ID)
    )
Hibernate: 
    create table ORDERS (
        ORDER_ID bigint not null auto_increment,
        quantity integer not null,
        primary key (ORDER_ID)
    )
Hibernate: 
    create table PRODUCT (
        PRODUCT_ID bigint not null auto_increment,
        name varchar(255),
        primary key (PRODUCT_ID)
    )
Hibernate: 
    create table PRODUCT_ORDER (
        ORDER_ID bigint,
        PRODUCT_ID bigint,
        primary key (ORDER_ID, PRODUCT_ID)
    )
Hibernate: 
    create table PRODUCT_ORDER_ADDRESS (
        ORDER_ID bigint not null,
        PRODUCT_ID bigint not null,
        ADDRESS_ID bigint not null
    )
Hibernate: 
    alter table PRODUCT_ORDER 
        add constraint FK_sl39bwx60xjbvoiujpaes74ty 
        foreign key (ORDER_ID) 
        references ORDERS (ORDER_ID)
Hibernate: 
    alter table PRODUCT_ORDER 
        add constraint FK_n0i7uxq6rxsc0mcred1cds4m9 
        foreign key (PRODUCT_ID) 
        references PRODUCT (PRODUCT_ID)
Hibernate: 
    alter table PRODUCT_ORDER_ADDRESS 
        add constraint FK_kad6crei9lgrv1nuuuff42vs8 
        foreign key (ADDRESS_ID) 
        references ADDRESS (ADDRESS_ID)
Hibernate: 
    alter table PRODUCT_ORDER_ADDRESS 
        add constraint FK_hpx0e467dvpqi5i6kxmujns2b 
        foreign key (ORDER_ID, PRODUCT_ID) 
        references PRODUCT_ORDER (ORDER_ID, PRODUCT_ID)