Hi All, I am using Hibernate (JPA) with Derby database - my app server is Jboss 6.0. I have to pre-populate a table with 50000 employee info and for that I have written a standalone JDBC program. Now from my Jboss-application I also need to insert new employee info on fly, in the same table and at that time I use JPA (since it runs within app container).

My Employee class is the Entity bean and has "Id" column being primary key with "@GeneratedValue(strategy = auto)" annotation so that Hibernate figures out the appropriate running serial no for the primary key (i.e. Id column).

Now the problem is Hibernate always starts this running serial number from "1" even if the Employee table already has entries (since I populated it thr the JDBC program). Thus from my jboss-application when I try to insert a new record using Entitymanager::persist(), I always get constrain violation error like "duplicate key value in a unique or primary key constraint or unique index". This is because hibernate tries to insert the new entry with Id =1 where as I already have an entry in that table with Id = 1.

My question is

a) How can I instruct Hibernate so that it starts generating "running serial no" based on total count of entries exist in that specific table? For example if the Employee table already contains 100 rows, I would expect Hibernate to start the auto-generation of the running serial from 101 onwards.
Can I do this in any way? like thru hibernate property/configuration change or implementing a special class, etc.?

b) Is there any other way to achieve the same?

c) If I write a standalone JPA program to do the bulk insert (i.e. pre-population) and then start my Jboss application, will hibernate be able to determine the right "running serial" no?

Thanks in advance for any suggestion, - kuntal

In @PrePersist method you can query the table and get the next value of your Id and set it in the object, this way you wont need the sequence generator.

Hi gmanoj77,
Can you pls. be more specific and provide a code snippet for this? I have the "Id" column, being the primary key, in my Employee entity bean with @GeneratedValue(strategy = auto)" annotation. Thus I do not (and probably can not) need to set the Id value while inserting a new record - hibernate does that for me.
Now if I have a @PrePersist method, how can I set this Id value?
Also do you mean I have to do this setting for every new insert? - then it will be a overkill.

Thanks