Enterprise JavaBeans, Fourth Edition

Chapter 7. CMP: Entity Relationships

Chapter 6 covered basic container-managed persistence (CMP), including container-managed persistence fields and an introduction to a basic container-managed relationship field. This chapter develops the Customer EJB and discusses 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. Chapter 6 demonstrated a one-to-one relationship between the Customer and Address EJBs. This relationship was unidirectional: the Customer had a reference to the Address, but the Address did not have a reference back to the Customer. This is a perfectly legitimate relationship, but other relationships are possible. For example, each Address could also reference its Customer, a bidirectional, one-to-one relationship in which both participants maintain references to each other. Entity beans can also have one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many relationships. For example, the Customer EJB 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 EJBs. 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 ...