Possible to not have foreign key relationship in child table to its parent in the database, while in JPA it will still be able to map out fine? How will this be done?
Can I still use @JoinColumn to define the field for reference back to the parent table?
This is a one-to-many relationship. One parent record, many child records.
I only care about writes to the database tables right now.
ANSWER
Yes, no FKs defined in the database is fine. JPA will still be able to map out there relationships as defined in your entity classes.
In fact, enabling – spring.jpa.generate-ddl – in your application properties file will create the necessary Foreign Key and/or Unique Key constraints in the database. This is vendor dependent however.
For a One To Many relationship, it is straightforward to do. Example below definition below:
@OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
@JoinColumn(name = "recommendation_id")
private List<CommentEntity> commentList;This will map out the entity object values to the Comment table, assuming that is the name of the target table. Each one will be persisted to the child table along with the ID of the parent Recomendation under the recommendation_id column.
