Specifify the collection name and column names

By default Morphia map your model class to the collection which is named after the model class’s simple name(), all fields are mapped to MongoDB columns with the same name. E.g.

@Entity public class User extends Model {
    public String firstName;
    public String lastName;
}

Now suppose you have a User instance:

User newUser = new User();
newUser.firstName = "John";
newUser.lastName = "Smith";
newUser.save();

After newUser.save() called, one new document will be persist in MongoDB:

> db.User.findOne()
{
        "_id": ObjectId("4ec09133c9c18ffd64f93992"),
        "className" : "models.User",
        "firstName": "John",
        "lastName": "Smith"
}

You might think it’s a waste of space to store “firstName” and “lastName” for each User document, and yes we have a way to shorten the name in MongoDB. Change your User model class as follows:

import play.modules.morphia.Model.Column;
import ...
@Entity("usr") public class User extends Model {
    @Column("fn") public class firstName;
    @Column("ln") public class lastName;
}

Now if we save an new user instance again and we get the following document in MongoDB:

> db.usr.findOne()
{
        "_id": ObjectId("4ec09133c9c18ffd64f93992"),
        "className" : "models.User",
        "fn": "John",
        "ln": "Smith"
}

So with the parameters we put into the @Entity and @Column annotation we changed to collection name from “User” to “usr”, and we changed to column name “firstName” to “fn”, and “lastName” to “ln”.

You can also use @com.google.code.morphia.annotations.Property in place of @play.modules.morphia.Model.Column. However if you use @Property annotation you will be forced to use full qualified annotation class name always, because the word Property is used by play.db.Model.Property interface and there is name confliction to @com.google.code.morphia.annotations.Property.

People might want to ask why Morphia store {"className": "models.User"}, okay, that’s for model inheritance usage. If you are sure your model will never be involved in model inheritance, then you could suppress the class name storage as follows:

@Entity(value="usr", noClassnameStored=true) 
public class User extends Model{
    ...
}

And now the User document in MongoDB will not have {"className": "models.User"} column created.

Community contributed extensions

Specifify the collection name and column names