@SequenceGenerator with Empty Sequence Name

ID

java.spring_data_empty_sequence_name

Severity

low

Remediation Complexity

trivial

Remediation Risk

low

Remediation Effort

low

Resource

Reliability

Language

Java

Tags

best-practice, spring

Description

Reports @SequenceGenerator annotations whose sequenceName attribute is set to an empty string. An empty sequence name causes the persistence provider to fall back to a default naming strategy, which is likely unintended and may collide with other sequence generators in the schema.

Rationale

When sequenceName is explicitly set to "", the provider generates a default sequence name (typically derived from the table or entity name). This defeats the purpose of specifying a sequence generator and can lead to unexpected collisions when multiple entities share the same default sequence.

// Bad: empty sequenceName
@Entity
@SequenceGenerator(name = "order_gen", sequenceName = "")
public class Order {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.SEQUENCE, generator = "order_gen")
    private Long id;
}

Remediation

Provide a meaningful sequence name, or remove the sequenceName attribute entirely to use the provider default intentionally.

// Good: explicit sequence name
@Entity
@SequenceGenerator(name = "order_gen", sequenceName = "order_id_seq")
public class Order {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.SEQUENCE, generator = "order_gen")
    private Long id;
}

References