Hibernate error: ids for this class must be manually assigned before calling save():

Your @Entity class has a String type for its @Id field, so it can’t generate ids for you.

If you change it to an auto increment in the DB and a Long in java, and add the @GeneratedValue annotation:

@Id
@Column(name="U_id")
@GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.IDENTITY)
private Long U_id;

it will handle incrementing id generation for you.