Hi Oliver,
I agree with your suggestion. We tried to bring in a Metatype/Stereotype-like functionality
into Java EE 7, but ran out of runway for this release. It is definitely on our roadmap
for Java EE 8 however. You can view the discussions on the javaee-spec.java.net project archives.
Could you please log this in the JPA JIRA as an RFE for JPA.next?
thanks,
-Linda
On 1/17/2013 7:50 AM, Oliver Gierke wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I repeatedly find myself annotating my JPA entities with the very same set of annotations:
>
> @Entity
> @EntityListeners(AuditingEntityListener.class)
> class Person {
>
> }
>
> If both @Entity and @EntityListener were allowed to be used as meta-annotations I could collapse them into:
>
> @Target(TYPE)
> @Retention(RUNTIME)
> @Entity
> @EntityListeners(AuditingEntityListener.class)
> @interface @AuditedEntity {
>
> }
>
> Resulting in:
>
> @AuditedEntity
> class Person {
>
> }
>
> This is in line with the meta-annotation handling CDI exposes to introduce annotation with richer semantics in annotation code [0]. The following changes would be required.
>
> - Add ElementType.ANNOTATION_TYPE to the relevant annotations
> - Specify that persistence providers have to evaluate the annotations from the meta-level as well using the first one found, so that locally defined annotations would be considered first.
>
> Cheers,
> Ollie
>
> [0] https://github.com/dblevins/metatypes/
>