I have a thread going on the redhat customer portal... but, I don't seem to be getting very far. Maybe someone here could give me a ya [or nay] on this. My thinking right now is this ISN'T possible.

I have a class A. It maps to table X.
I have another class B. It also maps to table X plus it contains a set from table Y.
And, another class C. It also maps to table X plus it contains a set from table Z.

Currently classes A, B, and C all have duplicate properties that map to the columns in table X. Works fine, but, I'd like to use class A as a super class for classes B and C. And, also use A [or another subclass of A] as an entity for simple table X access. Sounds simple... but, I've looped back on trying to figure this out for 2 years now. Time to put it to bed.

The first suggestion from the redhat support was to simply use the DiscriminatorFormula. Problem is classes B and C are "artificially distinct" from class A. Let me state the problem in another way.

In the real application database there are many many inter relationships. For some entities mapping ALL one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one joins would be impossible. Therefore, I've defined a very finite/useful subset of similar entities for each table mapping. The 'base entity' is nothing more than a direct mapping of a single table. The other 'alternate entities' are nothing more than 1-N additional one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one joins with the 'base entity'... in most cases joined by the 'base entity' primary key. So the distinction between 'alternate entity B' and 'alternate entity C' is simply due to the fact that I chose to include <Set>Y in one and <Set>Z in the other. So...

(select 1 from Y y where y.b_aId = aId) = 1
(select 1 from Z z where z.c_aId = aId) = 1

... are both true in all cases and would not make B distinct from C. Clear, I hope?

If you think this simply isn't possible a simple "yep, you painted yourself into a corner" will do. But, if you have a suggestion... I'd gratefully appreciate an example of the annotations needed to perform this miracle. Thanks!