I'm sure that this has come up in the past so sorry in advance if that's the case. I did find one thread but it got off track and never addressed the initial problem.

I have two tables for ease of use we'll just call them Parent and Child they have a many-to-many relationship so I add a look-up table(at least that's what I call them) called Parent_Child_Lookup that only has two fields parent_id and child_id this table only exists to link the parents with their children.

My Java objects are named the same as the table names.

Parent.java
- parentID int
- parentName String
- children LinkedList<Child>

Child.java
- childID int
- childName String

I cant figure out for the life of me a way to map these tables to show the relationship between the two. It would be great to know if there is a way to do this without having to create an object for the lookup table. Does this make sense? Any help or advice would be great. Thanks,
Jon

Well I don't know if I do properly answer but if you add a getter and setter for "parents" in your child.java and that in your hibernate mapping file for your child class:
<set name="parents" table="parentchild">
<key column="childID"/>
<many-to-many class="domain.Parent" column="parentID"/>
</set>
+ do the opposite for the Parent:
add a getter and setter for "children" and that in the hbm.xml file:
<set name="children" table="parentchild">
<key column="parentID"/>
<many-to-many class="domain.Child" column="childID"/>
</set>
, you don't have to create a specific java class for your junction table.