Best way to add annotations to inherited methods

Question

I have a number of abstract superclasses from which my concrete class inherit various methods. Some of these methods need to have JPA or JAXB annotations placed on them in the concrete class. Currently I do this via the following:

@MyLocalAnnotations
@Override
public method inheritedMethodHere (yadda yadda)
  {
  super.inheritedMethodHere(yadda yadda);
  }

Is there a way to do this without overriding the method? It seems like such a waste to override a method only to supply local annotations.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there isn't a better way than what you are doing now. To do what you are describing you will have to override the method, considering that your JPA annotation will need information specific to the concrete class.

With JPA annotations, you actually have two options -- you can annotate the methods, or you can annotate the properties. On our project we've standardized on annotating properties rather than methods, but this won't help you either, as the properties are presumably part of the concrete class. (If they are somehow shared in the super-class, then you REALLY will need to annotate the methods, and override them).

Its hard to make a recommendation without seeing your schema, but if your entity classes have so much in common that they share many properties in the super-class -- might they simply be stored in the same table, perhaps with a differentiating type column?

Or alternatively if they are not nearly identical, might you just reproduce the common properties in each concrete class? You might be causing yourself more work rather than saving yourself by trying to capture the common properties in the super class. Since you will have to annotate them individually in the concrete classes, just declare them in the concrete classes. If you need common methods that interact with these properties, a separate Utility class to capture those functions could be the answer.

On our project we DO sometimes use a common super class for entities, but it captures some meta-data about the entity -- nothing that would impact persistence logic. Therefore, no JPA annotations are needed (nor would they make sense) in the abstract class.