How can I access the repository from the entity in Spring Boot?

You can access the Spring Application Context from static method and use this static method to load your repository bean in your @Entity class instead of autowiring it.

You need to create the following classes (found here):

ApplicationContextProvider

@Component
public class ApplicationContextProvider implements ApplicationContextAware {

    private static ApplicationContext context;

    public ApplicationContext getApplicationContext() {
        return context;
    }

    @Override
    public void setApplicationContext(ApplicationContext ctx) {
        context = ctx;
    }
}

SpringConfiguration

@Configuration
public class SpringConfiguration {

    @Bean
    public static ApplicationContextProvider contextProvider() {
        return new ApplicationContextProvider();
    }

}

And then

@Entity
public class Account {
    //your code

    public void doAccountRepositoryStuff() {
        AccountRepository accountRepository = (AccountRepository) SpringConfiguration.contextProvider().getApplicationContext().getBean("accountRepository");
        // Do your own stuff with accountRepository here...
    }
}

I had same question and found this Github repository.

Here are some parts of code:

...
import de.ck35.example.ddd.jpa.SpringEntityListener;
...

@Entity
@Table(name="bookshelf")
@EntityListeners(SpringEntityListener.class)
public class BookshelfEntity implements Bookshelf {

    ...


    private String category;

    @Autowired transient BookRepository bookRepository;
    @Autowired transient BookshelfSpaceRepository bookshelfSpaceRepository;

Where de.ck35.example.ddd.jpa.SpringEntityListener purpose is described in Javadoc:

/**
 * Entity listener which allows dependency injection inside entities.
 * The listener can be registered via {@link EntityListeners} annotation.
 * 
 * Dependency injection annotations like {@link Autowired} are supported.
 * 
 * @author Christian Kaspari
 * @since 1.0.0
 */
public class SpringEntityListener {

    ...

    @PostLoad
    @PostPersist
    public void inject(Object object) {
        AutowireCapableBeanFactory beanFactory = get().getBeanFactory();
        if(beanFactory == null) {
            LOG.warn("Bean Factory not set! Depdendencies will not be injected into: '{}'", object);
            return;
        }
        LOG.debug("Injecting dependencies into entity: '{}'.", object);
        beanFactory.autowireBean(object);
    }

There is also configuration which enables Repositories definitions nested in classes (in this case entities):

@Configuration
@EnableJpaRepositories(basePackages="de.ck35.example.ddd.jpa", considerNestedRepositories=true)
@ComponentScan("de.ck35.example.ddd.jpa")
public class JpaConfiguration {

Thanks to Christian Kaspari who is author of this repository.

I'm guessing you are trying to implement something like the Active Record pattern in Hibernate. It's quite unusual but you could annotate your entity with @Configurable so you can get internally @Autowired to work (Also ensure entity package is within your @ComponentScan reach)

You have to use @GenericGenerator and @GeneratedValue see an example here. Please notice that in the IdentifierGenerator implemntation you can access the repository.

If this is for non-id field, then the work around will be to make a new entity GeneralSequenceNumber and its ID is the required generated ID, then make one to one mapping between GeneralSequenceNumber and your Account entity (as mentioned here)

@Entity
public class GeneralSequenceNumber {
 @Id
 @GenericGenerator(name = "sequence_dep_id", strategy = "com.xyz.ids.DepartmentIdGenerator")
 @GeneratedValue(generator = "sequence_dep_id")  
 @Column(name="Department_Id")
 private String deptId;
}

@Entity 
public class Account {
  @Id ..
  private Long id;

  @OneToOne(...)
  private GeneralSequnceNumber myVal;
} 

I saw the method below in a project because there were no Service layer at that project. To be honest, I recommend adding Service layer instead of these solutions but if you really want/have to use it, the solution is below.

Create Repository Interface

public interface BookRepository extends JpaRepository<Book, String> {
}

Create a Component

@Component
public class Registry {

private static BookRepository bookRepository;

static BookRepository bookRepo() {
    return bookRepository;
}

}

Achieve the repo by using static function in the Component

import static com.x.Registry.bookRepo;
@Entity
class Book {
    public static List<Book> all() {
        return bookRepo().findAll();
    }
}