Can field names not start with a single letter camel case?

Question

I am using Hibernate 3.6, JPA 2.0, and Spring 3.0.6. I have fields in my objects like the following:
class PersonContact {
Long eAddressCpId;
ElectronicAddress eAddress;
I use field access (in my orm files) and queries/inserts/etc work without an issue. The fields are both in the class as well as in the orm files. But on startup of the application, the JPA configuration load spits out warnings:
2011-02-22 15:38:10,785 [[STANDBY] ExecuteThread: '3' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'] WARN org.hibernate.cfg.annotations.reflection.JPAOverridenAnnotationReader - Property com.foo.model.contactpoint.ElectronicAddress.eAddress not found in class but described in <mapping-file/> (possible typo error)
2011-02-22 15:38:10,801 [[STANDBY] ExecuteThread: '3' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'] WARN org.hibernate.cfg.annotations.reflection.JPAOverridenAnnotationReader - Property com.foo.model.person.PersonContact.eAddressCpId not found in class but described in <mapping-file/> (possible typo error)
2011-02-22 15:38:10,801 [[STANDBY] ExecuteThread: '3' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'] WARN org.hibernate.cfg.annotations.reflection.JPAOverridenAnnotationReader - Property com.foo.model.person.PersonContact.eAddress not found in class but described in <mapping-file/> (possible typo error)
2011-02-22 15:38:10,817 [[STANDBY] ExecuteThread: '3' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'] WARN org.hibernate.cfg.annotations.reflection.JPAOverridenAnnotationReader - Property com.foo.model.person.PartyContact.eAddressCpId not found in class but described in <mapping-file/> (possible typo error)
2011-02-22 15:38:10,817 [[STANDBY] ExecuteThread: '3' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'] WARN org.hibernate.cfg.annotations.reflection.JPAOverridenAnnotationReader - Property com.foo.model.person.PartyContact.eAddress not found in class but described in <mapping-file/> (possible typo error)
If I change my field names to be from eAddress to electronicAddress and eAddressCpId to electronicAddressCpId , then I don't get these warnings.
Is there requirements around the field names?
Thanks..jay

Answer 1

Hi,
If you have this PersonContact.eAddress in your mapping file, Hibernate will look in PersonContact for
1 a public field called eAddress
2 a public member method called getEAddress (Or geteAddress).
3 a public member method called isEAddress(Or isAddress)
Your fields aren't public, so my guess is that getEAddress is found. From this "get" is stripped away and the rest is "decapitalized".
This decapitalize method has these lines:
if (name.length() > 1 && Character.isUpperCase(name.charAt(1)) &&
      Character.isUpperCase(name.charAt(0))){
             return name;
}So yes, I think there is a requirement with fields names. (Or rather getter names, since fields aren't decapitalized)
You could try and change your mapping file into PersonContact.EAddress to see if I'm right.
Btw, I am not a Java programmer, so this is what I could manage from a poor mans view at this (Open) source of Hibernate's.
Regards
Peter