I’m using JPA 2.1 and I have an entity object called Encounter that has one-to-one relationships with many other different objects of varying sizes (call them satellite objects). I would like these satellite objects to behave like value objects and be automatically replaced when a new instance of Encounter is saved. I have read many articles that show how to achieve this behavior by making the satellite objects embeddable objects instead of entities in a one-to-one relationship. That would work fine except that for any one “encounter” only a few of the large number satellite objects will be needed. Embedding them in a single table would waste a lot of table space and make the Encounter table more complex than necessary.
So is there a way to make an Entity in a one-to-one relationship behave like a value object without writing a lot of code to check if it exist, then delete it, then persist the new one?
