How can I join 3 entities in a table using JPA Hibernate without using @Mapsid

Question

[this is my DB design](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7ckz4.png)
[Users entitie](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8mMfR.png)
[Roles entitie](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ACYNB.png)
[Project entitie](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZJXKC.png)

The relation between Users and Has doesn't need to be unidirectional

Answer 1

Using this composite key class, we can create the entity class, which models the join table:

@Entity
class CourseRating {

    @EmbeddedId
    CourseRatingKey id;

    @ManyToOne
    @MapsId("studentId")
    @JoinColumn(name = "student_id")
    Student student;

    @ManyToOne
    @MapsId("courseId")
    @JoinColumn(name = "course_id")
    Course course;

    int rating;
    
    // standard constructors, getters, and setters
}


This code is very similar to a regular entity implementation. However, we have some key differences:

We used @EmbeddedId to mark the primary key, which is an instance of the CourseRatingKey class.
We marked the student and course fields with @MapsId.
@MapsId means that we tie those fields to a part of the key, and they're the foreign keys of a many-to-one relationship. We need it because, as we mentioned, we can't have entities in the composite key.

After this, we can configure the inverse references in the Student and Course entities as before:

class Student {

    // ...

    @OneToMany(mappedBy = "student")
    Set<CourseRating> ratings;

    // ...
}

class Course {

    // ...

    @OneToMany(mappedBy = "course")
    Set<CourseRating> ratings;

    // ...
}

Note that there's an alternative way to use composite keys: the @IdClass annotation.

3.4. Further Characteristics We configured the relationships to the Student and Course classes as @ManyToOne. We could do this because with the new entity we structurally decomposed the many-to-many relationship to two many-to-one relationships.

Why were we able to do this? If we inspect the tables closely in the previous case, we can see that it contained two many-to-one relationships. In other words, there isn't any many-to-many relationship in an RDBMS. We call the structures we create with join tables many-to-many relationships because that's what we model.

Besides, it's more clear if we talk about many-to-many relationships because that's our intention. Meanwhile, a join table is just an implementation detail; we don't really care about it.

Moreover, this solution has an additional feature we haven't mentioned yet. The simple many-to-many solution creates a relationship between two entities. Therefore, we cannot expand the relationship to more entities. But we don't have this limit in this solution: we can model relationships between any number of entity types.

For example, when multiple teachers can teach a course, students can rate how a specific teacher teaches a specific course. That way, a rating would be a relationship between three entities: a student, a course and a teacher.