So you want your surrogate keys generated by the database, except when they were already generated by the customer. How are you going to avoid collisions, if the database wants to set id=12345, but a customer-imported entry with that id already exists?
The short answer to your question is: don't do this. I don't want to go into the old natural key vs surrogate key debate, this has been done already for example here. And google "codd surrogate keys" to learn how to properly use them. All i want to say is: if you use surrogate keys, then have your database generate them, and treat everything from outside as additional lookup key. That's the sane way.
The long answer is: if you really want to do this, and if you really know what you're doing, you can implement your own IdGenerator class. In JPA for example, you could annotate your id:
@Id
@GenericGenerator(name = "customId", strategy = "com.example.CustomIdGenerator", parameters = { @Parameter(name = "sequence", value = "SEQ_IDGENERATOR") })
@GeneratedValue(generator = "customId")
@Column(name = "ID", unique = true, nullable = false)
private Integer id;
Your customIdGenerator would then extend SequenceGenerator:
public class CustomIdGenerator extends SequenceGenerator {
public Serializable generate(SessionImplementor session, Object obj) {
// return o.getId() if obj.getId() is not null
// newId = SEQ_IDGENERATOR.nextval
// while (newId is already in db) newId = SEQ_IDGENERATOR.nextval
// return newId
}
}
and your database would provide SEQ_IDGENERATOR. Id would no longer be an autogenerated field but simply
create table foo( id integer not null primary key, ...);
But again: you don't want to do this. You want your surrogate keys to be irrelevant to the outside world and handled by the database.