Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0, 5th Edition

Chapter 7. Entity Relationships

Chapter 6 covered basic persistence mappings, including various ways to define primary keys as well as simple and complex property-type mappings. This chapter develops our Titan Cruises application a bit further by discussing the seven relationships that entity beans can have with each other.

In order to model real-world business concepts, entity beans must be capable of forming complex relationships. If we turned our embedded Address object in Chapter 6 into a first-class entity bean, we would have had a one-to-one relationship between our Customer entity and an Address entity. The Address could be queried and cached like any other entity, yet a close relationship would be forged with the Customer entity. Entity beans can also have one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many relationships. For example, the Customer entity may have many phone numbers, but each phone number belongs to only one customer (a one-to-many relationship). A customer may have been on many cruises, and each cruise has many customers (a many-to-many relationship).

The Seven Relationship Types

Seven types of relationships can exist between entity beans. There are four types of cardinality: one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many. In addition, each relationship can be either unidirectional or bidirectional. These options seem to yield eight possibilities, but if you think about it, you’ll realize that one-to-many and many-to-one bidirectional relationships ...