While not used as identifier property, some (group of) properties represent natural identifier of an entity. This is especially true when the schema uses the recommended approach of using surrogate primary key even if a natural business key exists. Hibernate allows to map such natural properties and reuse them in a
Criteria query. The natural identifier is composed of all the properties marked @NaturalId.
@Entity
public class Citizen {
@Id
@GeneratedValue
private Integer id;
private String firstname;
private String lastname;
@NaturalId
@ManyToOne
private State state;
@NaturalId
private String ssn;
...
}
//and later on query
List results = s.createCriteria( Citizen.class )
.add( Restrictions.naturalId().set( "ssn", "1234" ).set( "state", ste ) )
.list();
Note that the group of properties representing the natural identifier have to be unique (Hibernate will generate a unique constraint if the database schema is generated).