Lucky me. I took over a system whose database is awash with compound keys. The more I work with this stuff, the more justification I find for always having a simple sequence key as the primary key, despite the apparent extra overhead.
I’ve had a long-running problem where parent-child (one-to-many) relationships weren’t able to fetch their children. At best, the collection came up empty. At worst, accessing the children collection property of the parent would throw a NullPointerException because the “bag” property of the PersistentBagCollection wasn’t initialized.
I spent a LOT of time with Hibernate’s trace-level logging turned on and the only thing I could determine was that the children were, in fact, being correctly loaded and formed into a collection, but the collection wasn’t the collection that was bound to the parent – instead the child collection was being silently lost.
One thing that did look suspicious, however was that the trace showed two collections found. I went round and round with this, added various bits of code that made objects more identifiable in the debugger, and finally – at long last ended up with a set of trace messages showing the owner primary keys of these collections.
Lo, and behold! One of them showed trailing spaces in the key field values, the other did not.
Trailing spaces in ORM fields have much the same effect and being sloppy with upper/lower case in Java filenames under Windows. Sometimes you get away with it, but not always. Because of the trailing spaces, the two primary keys didn’t compare equal, the “real” collection couldn’t be attached to its parent, and data was lost.
I suppose that this problem could be avoided by proper implementation of the equals() and hashCode() methods of the offending primary key objects, but I found it easier to simply force the key objects to be space-padded and to be more careful about what I passed to search functions, since the ultimate problem lies in the fact that sending a space-trimmed value to a Hibernate JPA query will match and return a space-padded object.
The ultimate cure for this would probably be to use fixed-size character arrays instead of String objects, but there are several problems here as well:
- Java’s static type checking doesn’t cover mismatches on array size.
- Individual characters in a character array can be null
- The ORM class-generating tools I use render fixed character fields as Strings, not arrays
- I’m not actually sure that either JPA or Hibernate support character array properties. I have enough grief trying to portably represent boolean and enum values.
