Hello,

is there any way to use a @GeneratedValue (@GenericGenerator, UserType...) for automated getting of uniqie values for non-key properties.

I need to generate the customer id's with a spezial name conventions: e.g. B0123456.

I think, it doesn't make sense to use those bussines identifier as a primary keys. But i didn't find any simple possibility to generate such unique/incremented values for non-primary key fields yet.

The @Embeddable with one @Id-annotated collumn could be a workaround, but it doesn't support any type of @GeneratedValue. (and if, how would i get 'B' before @Id?).

So i need a help!

Many thanks, Gena

Hi, its a pity that nobody had an idea.

It's possible, that my post is to stupid to be answered. But in my opinion, there are many cases in which a DB-wide unique identifier could be usefull or needed. Its also possible to retrieve it from the underlying db using hibernate before the entity is persisted, but if those retrieved value will be used as surrogate pk we need an approach to say the hibernate, that the entity is transient and must be inserted and not updated (so we need no select before, since its clear to us, the entity is transient).

The second possibility is to create a dummy entity with a desired id generation strategy and get the unique id for it but not persist this heler entity at all (its a dummy). We get the same problem as in a paragraph above, because the id will be retrieved only at the insertion time. We need to use a hibernate metadata of a desired (dummy) entity with a desired id-generation strategy to get an unique identifier by using hibernate.

If some one is intrested on this approach/idea, please read following article i found usefull:
http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/30396/1954?pf=true