I recently changed a schema to be more normalized by factoring out a column of type varchar2 that takes one of only a few dozen, but long values, so I created a lookup table for these strings and replaced the sting-valued column in the main entity with a foreign-key valued column, referencing the lookup table.
So now when I persist the main entity, I need to perform a lookup in the string lookup table and only create a new lookup entity if there's no entry, otherwise set the main entity's lookup ref to the PK of the found, matched string. How can I do this in the jpa producer without introducing EntityManager/Query code in the entity or some pre-processing bean? Thanks, Chris
