Entity Mapping with Inheritance in Hibernate

Story

Using inheritance to map a paper-book and audio-book type of data.

Solution

The following Resource class uses @MappedSuperclass annotation to abstract the shared properties into a superclass that represents a resource that could be extended by all concrete resources. In this case, we also make the resource generic so that each the primary key property id could be flexible with the type of its subclass.

By using the @MappedSuperclass instead of the @Entity annotation on the superclass, it tells Hibernate to create these superclass properties in each of the respective subclass tables in the database.

@MappedSuperclass
public class Resource<T> {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = AUTO)
    private T id;

    @Column(length=255)
    private String name;

    // getters and setters are omitted for brevity
}

@Entity
public class PaperBook extends Resource<Long> {
    private String author;
        
    // getters and setters are omitted for brevity
}

@Entity
public class AudioBook extends Resource<Long> {
    private String author;
    private String toldBy;

    // getters and setters are omitted for brevity
}

@Entity
public class Dvd extends Resource<Long> {
    private String director;

    // getters and setters are omitted for brevity
}

Lesson Learnt

• @MappedSuperclass annotation could be used on superclass to enable inheritance in entity mapping.