Spring Data JPA One To One Relationship Mapping Example

Spring Data JPA provides excellent support for creating Spring-powered applications that communicate with different relational databases to implement JPA-based repositories.

Java Persistence API (JPA) is just a specification that defines an object-relational mapping (ORM) standard for storing, accessing, and managing Java objects in a relational database. Hibernate is the most popular and widely used implementation of JPA specifications. By default, Spring Data JPA uses Hibernate as a JPA provider.

Hibernate provides a framework for mapping relational database tables to entity classes in your application. You can describe the relationships between these entities as you define relationships among the tables in your relational database.

In this article, you'll learn how to create a one-to-one mapping between two entities using Spring Data JPA in a Spring Boot and MySQL application.

Dependencies

You just need spring-data-starter-data-jpa and mysql-connector-java dependencies to use Spring Data JPA with the MySQL database.

For a Gradle project, add the following dependencies to your build.gradle file:

implementation 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-data-jpa'
runtimeOnly 'mysql:mysql-connector-java'

For a Maven project, include the following dependencies to your pom.xml file:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>mysql</groupId>
    <artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId>
    <scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency>

If you want to create a new Spring Boot project from scratch, just use Spring Initializr web tool to bootstrap a new application with the above dependencies.

Configure MySQL Database

By default, Spring Boot automatically configures the DataSource bean for in-memory databases like H2 database. But for MySQL, we need to manually define the database connection details in a properties file.

Open your application.properties file and add the following properties:

# MySQL connection properties
spring.datasource.driver-class-name=com.mysql.cj.jdbc.Driver
spring.datasource.username=root
spring.datasource.password=mypass
spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/testdb?createDatabaseIfNotExist=true&useSSL=false

# Log JPA queries
# Comment this in production
spring.jpa.show-sql=true

# Drop and create new tables (create, create-drop, validate, update)
# Only for testing purposes - comment this in production
spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto=create

# Hibernate SQL dialect
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.dialect=org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect

Spring Boot will read the above properties and auto-configure a DataSource bean for you. Make sure to change the spring.datasource.username and spring.datasource.password properties to match your MySQL credentials.

The hibernate property spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto = create will automatically create database tables based on the entity classes in your application on startup.

We have also included the createDatabaseIfNotExist=true configuration property in spring.datasource.url to automatically create the database if it doesn't already exist.

One-To-One Relationship

A one-to-one relationship refers to the relationship between two entities/database tables A and B in which only one element/row of A may be linked to one element/row of B, and vice versa.

Let us consider an application scenario where you want to store users' information along with their addresses. We want to ensure that a user can have just one postal address, and a postal address can only be associated with a single user.

We can map the above requirement as a one-to-one relationship between the user and the address entities, as shown in the following Entity-Relationship (ER) diagram:

Spring Data JPA One-To-One Mapping

The one-to-one relationship is defined using a foreign key called user_id in the addresses table.

Create Entities

You need to create the following two entity classes to map the above database tables.

`User` Entity

Let us define the below User entity in your application to map the users database table:

package com.attacomsian.jpa.one2one.domains;

import javax.persistence.*;
import java.io.Serializable;

@Entity
@Table(name = "users")
public class User implements Serializable {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    private Long id;

    private String name;
    private String email;
    private String password;

    @OneToOne(mappedBy = "user", fetch = FetchType.LAZY,
            cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
    private Address address;

    public User() {
    }

    public User(String name, String email, String password) {
        this.name = name;
        this.email = email;
        this.password = password;
    }

    // getters and setters, equals(), toString() .... (omitted for brevity)
}

`Address` Entity

To map the addresses table, you need to define the following Address entity:

package com.attacomsian.jpa.one2one.domains;

import javax.persistence.*;
import java.io.Serializable;

@Entity
@Table(name = "addresses")
public class Address implements Serializable {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    private Long id;

    private String street;
    private String city;
    private String state;
    private String zipCode;
    private String country;

    @OneToOne(fetch = FetchType.LAZY, optional = false)
    @JoinColumn(name = "user_id", nullable = false)
    private User user;

    public Address() {
    }

    public Address(String street, String city, String state, String zipCode,
                   String country) {
        this.street = street;
        this.city = city;
        this.state = state;
        this.zipCode = zipCode;
        this.country = country;
    }

    // getters and setters, equals(), toString() .... (omitted for brevity)
}

Both User and Address classes are annotated with Entity to indicate that they are JPA entities.

The @Table annotation is used to specify the name of the database table that should be mapped to this entity.

The id attributes are annotated with both @Id and @GeneratedValue annotations. The former indicates that they are the primary keys of the entities. The latter defines the primary key generation strategy. In the above case, we have declared that the primary key should be an AUTO INCREMENT field.

`@OneToOne` Annotation

In Spring Data JPA, a one-to-one relationship between two entities is declared using the @OneToOne annotation. It accepts the following parameters:

fetch — Defines a strategy for fetching data from the database. By default, it is EAGER indicating that the data must be eagerly fetched. We have set it to LAZY to fetch the entities lazily from the database.
cascade — Defines a set of cascadable operations applied to the associated entity. CascadeType.ALL means to apply all cascading operations to the related entity. The cascading operations are applied when you delete or update the parent entity.
mappedBy — Defines the entity that owns the relationship, which is the Address entity in our case.
optional — Defines whether the relationship is optional. If set to false, then a non-null relationship must always exist.

In a bidirectional relationship, we have to specify a @OneToOne annotation in both entities. But only one entity is the owner of the association. Usually, the child entity owns the relationship, and the parent entity is the inverse side of the relationship.

`@JoinColumn` Annotation

The @JoinColumn annotation is used to specify the foreign key column in the relationship owner. The inverse side of the relationship sets the @OneToOne's mappedBy parameter to indicate that the relationship is mapped by the other entity.

The @JoinColumn accepts the following two parameters, among others:

name — Defines the name of the foreign key column.
nullable — Defines whether the foreign key column is nullable. By default, it is true.

Create Repositories

Finally, let us create repository interfaces to save and retrieve User and Address entities from the database. We'll extend our repositories from Spring Data JPA's CrudRepository interface, which provides generic CRUD methods out-of-the-box.

`UserRepository` Interface

Here is what our UserRepository interface looks like:

package com.attacomsian.jpa.one2one.repositories;

import com.attacomsian.jpa.one2one.domains.User;
import org.springframework.data.repository.CrudRepository;

public interface UserRepository extends CrudRepository<User, Long> {

}

`AddressRepository` Interface

The next step is to create the following AddressRepository interface:

package com.attacomsian.jpa.one2one.repositories;

import com.attacomsian.jpa.one2one.domains.Address;
import org.springframework.data.repository.CrudRepository;

public interface AddressRepository extends CrudRepository<Address, Long> {

}

That's all you need to do to define a one-to-one mapping in Spring Data JPA. Now, you're ready to perform the CRUD operations on the User and Address entities without implementing the above interfaces. This is what makes Spring Data JPA a powerful tool.

Create an Application Class

Let us now create the main application for our Spring Boot console application to test our one-to-one relationship mapping:

Application.java

package com.attacomsian.jpa;

import com.attacomsian.jpa.one2one.domains.Address;
import com.attacomsian.jpa.one2one.domains.User;
import com.attacomsian.jpa.one2one.repositories.AddressRepository;
import com.attacomsian.jpa.one2one.repositories.UserRepository;
import org.springframework.boot.CommandLineRunner;
import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;

@SpringBootApplication
public class Application {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }

    @Bean
    public CommandLineRunner mappingDemo(UserRepository userRepository,
                                         AddressRepository addressRepository) {
        return args -> {

            // create a user instance
            User user = new User("John Doe", "john.doe@example.com", "1234abcd");

            // create an address instance
            Address address = new Address("Lake View 321", "Berlin", "Berlin",
                    "95781", "DE");

            // set child reference
            address.setUser(user);

            // set parent reference
            user.setAddress(address);

            // save the parent
            // which will save the child (address) as well
            userRepository.save(user);
        };
    }
}

We've defined a CommandLineRunner interface bean in the main application class. This interface provides a run() method, which is automatically invoked by Spring Boot after the application context is loaded.

Run the Application

Now is the time to run the application to see the output. If you are using Gradle, execute the following command to start the application:

$ ./gradlew bootRun

For Maven, type the following command to launch the application:

$ ./mvnw spring-boot:run

Once the application is started, you should see the following lines printed on the console:

Hibernate: drop table if exists addresses
Hibernate: drop table if exists users
Hibernate: create table addresses (id bigint not null auto_increment, city varchar(255), country varchar(255), state varchar(255), street varchar(255), zip_code varchar(255), user_id bigint not null, primary key (id)) engine=InnoDB
Hibernate: create table users (id bigint not null auto_increment, email varchar(255), name varchar(255), password varchar(255), primary key (id)) engine=InnoDB
Hibernate: insert into users (email, name, password) values (?, ?, ?)
Hibernate: insert into addresses (city, country, state, street, user_id, zip_code) values (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)
...

Source Code: Download the complete source code from GitHub available under MIT license.

Conclusion

That's all. In this article, you learned how to map and use a one-to-one relationship in Spring Data JPA and Hibernate.

In upcoming articles, I will explain in detail how to use one-to-many and many-to-many relationships in Spring Data JPA. Do not forget to join the newsletter if you want to be the first to know when new tutorials are available.

Spring Data JPA One To One Relationship Mapping Example

Dependencies

Configure MySQL Database

One-To-One Relationship

Create Entities

`User` Entity

`Address` Entity

`@OneToOne` Annotation

`@JoinColumn` Annotation

Create Repositories

`UserRepository` Interface

`AddressRepository` Interface

Create an Application Class

Run the Application

Conclusion

Further Reading

You might also like...

Buy me a coffee ☕

✨ Learn to build modern web applications using JavaScript and Spring Boot

Spring Data JPA One To One Relationship Mapping Example

Dependencies

Configure MySQL Database

One-To-One Relationship

Create Entities

User Entity

Address Entity

@OneToOne Annotation

@JoinColumn Annotation

Create Repositories

UserRepository Interface

AddressRepository Interface

Create an Application Class

Run the Application

Conclusion

Further Reading

You might also like...

Buy me a coffee ☕

✨ Learn to build modern web applications using JavaScript and Spring Boot

`User` Entity

`Address` Entity

`@OneToOne` Annotation

`@JoinColumn` Annotation

`UserRepository` Interface

`AddressRepository` Interface