4 Understanding Entities
This chapter introduces and describes entities. An entity is a lightweight persistence domain object. Typically, an entity represents a table in a relational database, and each entity instance corresponds to a row in the table. The primary programming artifact of an entity is the entity class, although entities can use helper classes.
The persistent state of an entity is represented either through persistent fields or persistent properties. These fields or properties use object/relational mapping annotations to map the entities and entity relationships to the relational data in the underlying data store.
You can configure your entity's identity, as well as the locking technique and sequence generation options for your entity.
This chapter includes the following sections:
