Modifying property names in JPA queries

Question

I'm using a convention of prefixing field names with an underscore. When I generate annotate entity classes with such fields I am stuck to using the underscore-prefixed property names in queries. I want to avoid that, and be able to do:

@Entity
public class Container {

    private String _value;
}

// in a lookup method
executeQuery("from Container where value = ?", value);

Is that possible with JPA in general or Hibernate in particular?

---

Update: Still trying to remember why, but I need this to be annotated on fields rather than on getters.

Answer 1

You could perhaps write subclasses of your generated entity classes, which have getter methods on them, and then configure the entity manager to use getter/setter access instead if field access? Then your getters/setters could have any name you liked.

Answer 2

You can annotate the getter:

@Entity
public class Container {

    private String _value;

    @Column
    public String getValue()
    {
        return _value;
    }

    public void setValue( String value )
    {
        this._value = value;
    }

}

Answer 3

Have a look at NamingStrategy. It would be fairly easy to extend the DefaultNamingStrategy and override the columnName method to strip the first underscore (if it is there).