I have created a Spring Boot JPA micro service with a MySQL back end. I have two simple entities in my model, users and skills. These are used to represent the skills base within my organisation. Each user may have many skills and so I have used a one to many join to model this and can successfully assign skills to users. In my database, I can see that a users_skills table has been created by JPA to achieve this.
However, I am now struggling because, for each skill that a user has, an experience level needs to be specified (e.g. basic, advanced, expert) and I am unsure how to achieve this. I'm not sure whether 'levels' should just be an enum type within the Skill entity, or perhaps it should be a separate entity in its own right? Could I configure JPA so that it generates a users_skills_levels table which would represent this three-way relationship? Any advice would be most welcome!
These are my Entity classes: -
@Entity
@Table(name = "users")
public class User {
@Id
@GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.IDENTITY)
private Integer id;
private String name;
private String email;
@OneToMany(
cascade = CascadeType.ALL,
orphanRemoval = true
)
private Set<Skill> skills = new HashSet<>();
getters and setters
}
@Entity
@Table(name = "skills")
public class Skill {
@Id
@GeneratedValue(strategy= GenerationType.IDENTITY)
private Integer id;
private String name;
getters and setters
}
