[FIXED] Annotation type not applicable to this kind of declaration error in package info class in Java 8

Issue

I have a package info class, it used to compile in Java 6/7. But in Java 8, I get compilation errors:

*****error: annotation type not applicable to this kind of declaration @NamedNativeQueries({

error: annotation type not applicable to this kind of declaration @SqlResultSetMappings({*****

This is the code:

@NamedNativeQueries({

    @NamedNativeQuery(name = "",
        query = "",
        resultSetMapping = "mapping"
    ),
    NamedNativeQuery(
         name = "",
         query = "",
         callable = true,
         readOnly = false,
         resultSetMapping = ""
    )
})

@SqlResultSetMappings({

})

package abc.domain;
import javax.persistence.ColumnResult;
import javax.persistence.EntityResult;
import javax.persistence.FieldResult;
import javax.persistence.NamedNativeQueries;
import javax.persistence.NamedNativeQuery;
import javax.persistence.SqlResultSetMapping;
import javax.persistence.SqlResultSetMappings;

Thanks in advance for your help

Solution

EDIT: Additional comments have made more clear what's going wrong here; as a consequence, the nature of this answer has changed somewhat.

It sounds like you switched from Hibernate's own version of @NamedNativeQueries and company, which you can stick on packages, to the general javax persistence variant, which cannot be placed on packages.

You must have removed and re-generated the imports in your attempt to convert this code. Don't do that - remove all those imports and replace them with import org.hibernate.annotations.NamedNativeQueries and friends instead.

---

For posterity, the original answer, still valid but only in context specifically for javax.persistence.NamedNativeQueries.

You must be misremembering; it does not and never has worked on java7 (that's the java7 docs of amedNativeQueries - note how it has a @Target(value=TYPE) marker, so it cannot be put on a package, and that's the v7 edition of the docs!)

You put such things on a type, for example the top level type. Which means the annotations appear near the top, but after the package statement. Given that you're using them in a package-info.java file, they simply cannot appear here (and never could).

SqlResultSetMappings is the same.

There's a small chance that somehow javac7 didn't actually check the Target condition of these annotations. However, that simply means that your code never worked, even if it did compile.

Answered By - rzwitserloot
Answer Checked By - Marie Seifert (JavaFixing Admin)