18

I am not clever from ORMlite documentation. Is is possible to declare in class, that this parameter is foreign key?

e.g. I have table Customer:

@DatabaseTable(tableName = "customer")
public class Customer {
    @DatabaseField(id = true)
    private String customerName;

    @DatabaseField
    private String customerSurname;

    @DatabaseField(foreign = true)
    private String accountNameHolder;

    @DatabaseField
    private int age;

    public Customer() {
    }
}

AccountNameHolder should aim towards DatabaseField name from table Accounts. How to do that? I have found only parameter foreign = true, but there is nothing about, which parameter and from which table it represents.

Thanks

Gray
  • 115,027
  • 24
  • 293
  • 354
Waypoint
  • 17,283
  • 39
  • 116
  • 170

1 Answers1

40

AccountNameHolder should aim towards DatabaseField name from table Accounts. How to do that?

I'm not exactly sure what you want but possibly you should change your foreign field to be the actual type instead of a name:

@DatabaseField(foreign = true)
private Account account;

Internally, ORMLite will store a account_id field (maybe the string name) in the Customer table but you don't have to worry about that. Remember that when you query for a Customer, the Account that is set on the account field will just have the id field set. To have ORMLite also lookup the account you will need to set the foreignAutoRefresh=true.

As @Lalit pointed out, here is some documentation on this subject. We've spent a long time on the documentation so it should be helpful.

Also, there is some example code about foreign fields.

Hope this helps.

Gray
  • 115,027
  • 24
  • 293
  • 354
  • 1
    How can I define the foreign column name to use for the lookup if it's not the PK of it (i.e. in the example - if it's not account.id)? I'm looking for something like a foreignColumnName annotation, but doesn't exist. Reason is that I'm using an existing database (not created by ORMLite) with already defined, fixed column names and FKs. One constraint is a one-to-one constraint of a varchar column, which is not the PK of the other table though, even though it's unique. – Mathias Conradt Feb 26 '12 at 11:24
  • 1
    `foreignColumnName` was added to `DatabaseField` annotation in version 4.39 released in April 2012 @MathiasLin. – Gray Dec 18 '13 at 15:12
  • @Gray while looking at logs from 'ndroidCompiledStatement' tag I see that ORMLite creates primary key statements (INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT) for field annotated as primary key, but it doesn't create any statements for fields annotated as foreign key (FOREIGN KEY (X_Id) REFERENCES Persons(Y_Id)). Could you explain why it's not executed for foreign-keys? – Piotr Jul 06 '14 at 02:45
  • Just haven't gotten there @Piotr. Not sure how to answer otherwise. Feel free to submit a patch. – Gray Jul 08 '14 at 14:08