I've got to persist an object of class A.

Class A has a lot (10+) many-to-one relationships to other classes.

Before persisting A I need to find out whether a particular instance of A already exists in the database.

If so, I need to update it, if not, I need to create a new instance.

Because the table to which A is mapped has a lot of rows (millions) and A has a lot of foreign keys to the relating tables I thought using a view to quickly retrieve an existing instance of A.

Questions are:
- Can I use the same class A and map it both directly to the table and to the view ?
- If not, I need to classes I guess, class A and class AView where AView is mapped to the view.
- How can I retrieve AView from the view and then update it so that the updates "appear" in the table class A is mapped to ? So I want to retrieve the object via the view, and update it via the table mapping.

Thanks,
EDH