I have a situation where it would be useful to be able to retrieve an entity from a @ManyToOne mapping, but also set the property by ID. So when I accessing an existing record I can easily read access the associated entities, but when defining associated entities I only need a primary key rather than constructing a complete entity.

So, using the same column of "TagID", I would like to refer to the associated Tag entity/class like so:

@ManyToOne(fetch = FetchType.LAZY)
@JoinColumn(name = "TagID", nullable = false)
@NotNull
public Tag getTag() {
return this.tag;
}

public void setTag(Tag tag) {
this.tag = tag;
}

But also as a simple Integer value, like so:

@Column(name = "TagID", nullable = false)
public Integer getTagId() {
return this.tagId;
}

public void setTag(Integer tagId) {
this.tagId = tagId;
}

Does hibernate support this?