JPA equivalent of Hibernate's @Generated(GenerationTime.ALWAYS)

Question

When certain non key fields of a entity are generated in the database (for instance, by triggers) a call to persist will not bring back values that the database has just generated. In practice this means that you may need to refresh an entity after persist or merge (and when level 2 cache is enabled you may even need to evict the entity).

Hibernate have a custom annotation @Generated which handles Generated Properties.

// Refresh property 1 on insert and update
@Generated(GenerationTime.ALWAYS) 
@Column(insertable = false, updatable = false)
private String property1;

// Refresh property 2 on insert
@Generated(GenerationTime.INSERT) 
@Column(insertable = false)
private String property2;

JPA @GeneratedValue only works with primary key properties.

So, my question is if there is a replacement for @Generated on JPA API (maybe on 2.1)? And if there isn't one, what is the best practice to handle non key database generated fields?

Answer 1

I read the specs from the beginning until the end and it is not such thing, nothing comparable with @Generated, sorry , and as you said.

The GeneratedValue annotation may be applied to a primary key property or field of an entity or mapped superclass in conjunction with the Id annotation.

What you could do is use Event Listener @PrePersist and @PreUpdate to set some properties by default or generated by utility classes before em persist the object , try that approach it comes to my mind to something similiar.