@Repeatable annotations for JDO and JPA

DataNucleus now provides access to Java8 @Repeatable annotations for use with JDO and JPA. Previously, if you wanted to specify, for example, multiple indexes for a class using annotations, you would have to do it like this (for JDO) using a container annotation

@Indices({
    @Index(name="MYINDEX_1", members={"field1","field2"}), 
    @Index(name="MYINDEX_2", members={"field3"})})
public class Person
{
    ...
}

The JDO 3.2 annotations have now been upgraded (in javax.jdo v3.2.0-m6) to support the Java8 @Repeatable setting meaning that you can now do

@Index(name="MYINDEX_1", members={"field1","field2"})
@Index(name="MYINDEX_2", members={"field3"})
public class Person
{
    ...
}

The same applies to all standard JDO annotations that have a container annotation.

 

For JPA, the same is also now true (though clearly since Oracle seemingly doesn’t care one iota about pushing the JPA spec forward then this is not in the official JPA spec yet). However since DataNucleus provides its own “standard” javax.persistence jar , we have now published version v2.2.0-m1 of this jar adding support for @Repeatable just like with the JDO 3.2 annotations. So any annotation that has container annotation can now be repeated on a class/field/method, you just have to use v2.2.0-m1 of the DataNucleus javax.persistence jar. For example

@Entity
@NamedNativeQuery(name="AllPeople", 
    query="SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE SURNAME = 'Smith'")
@NamedNativeQuery(name="PeopleCalledJones",
    query="SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE SURNAME = 'Jones')
public class Person
{
    ...
}