orm - Should JPA entities and DDD entities be the same classes?

Question

There are classes that are entities according to DDD, and there are classes that have @javax.persistence.Entity annotation. Should they be the same classes? Or should JPA entities act just as a mechanism for a mapper (https://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/dataMapper.html) to load DDD entities from a database (and store them) and be kept outside the domain model?

Would it make a difference if database metadata were separated and stored externally (for example, in XML)? If such classes are entities, where is the boundary? I think classes generated from XSD (for example, with JAXB) or even from database with MyBatis Generator are not entities as understood in DDD.

Answer 1

That's an implementation detail really. They could be or they could not depending on the flexibility of your ORM. For instance, if your ORM allows to map your domain objects without polluting them with persistence concerns then that's the approach that requires the less overhead and which I'd go for.

On the other hand, if your ORM is not flexible enough then you could go for a pragmatic hybrid approach where your AR and it's state are two different classes and where the state class is simple enough to easily be mapped. Note that the AR would still be responsible to protect it's state here and the state object wouldn't be accessed directly from outside the AR. The approach is described by Vaughn Vernon here.