[hibernate-issues] [Hibernate-JIRA] Commented: (HHH-4360) @UniqueConstraint declaration is not friendly towards inheritance or reflection

@UniqueConstraint declaration is not friendly towards inheritance or reflection ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Key: HHH-4360 URL: http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HHH-4360 Project: Hibernate Core Issue Type: Improvement Components: annotations Environment: Hibernate 3.2 GA Reporter: Steve Ebersole The current way to define a composite unique constraint is limiting. @Table(name="tbl_sky", uniqueConstraints = {@UniqueConstraint(columnNames={"month", "day"})} ) Suppose I have an abstract base class called A that gives me Id and Name, subclassed by abstract class B that gives me Customer. Then I have many concrete classes that subclass B. For all of these, I'd want the combination of Name and Customer to be unique. As I do not use @Table with abstract base classes, I currently have to repeat: uniqueConstraints = {@UniqueConstraint(columnNames={"name", "customer_id"})} on all concrete classes. If we had an alternate way to define these constraints at the property level (as XDoclet did with hibernate 2), I could define this in the base classes and inherit the constraint declaration. The other need is that I would like to use reflection to scan the properties and apply proper validations in the view layer. With @Column(unique = true) this is easy to do. The view layer makes an AJAX call and all is well. For a composite constraint, it does not work well currently.