The case involves both inheritance and association mappings

Class Structure is as under:
abstract Class ContactDetail
{
String type;
String label;
Long id;
}

Class Email extends ContactDetail
{
// discriminator value type is set to 'E'
String emailAddress;
}

Class PhoneNumber extends ContactDetail
{
// discriminator value type is set to 'P'
String phoneNumber;
}

Class PostalAddress extends ContactDetail
{
// discriminator value type is set to 'A'
String addressLine1;
String addressLine2;
String addressLine3;
String city;
String state;
String country;
String zip;
}

I hv these mapped based on the Table per Class Hierarchy model and it works fine.

Next Step was to add these as a collection to a Person Class.

Class Person
{
Long id;
Collection<ContactDetail> contactDetails;
}

I need this collection based on a JoinTable and hv used required mappings and am able to do fetch etc.

The problem comes when I want to query for a Person based on phoneNumber / EmailAddress.

Query q1 = session.createQuery("select e from Person as e, IN (e.contactDetails) as c WHERE c.emailAddress like :p1");
Query q2 = session.createQuery("select e from Person as e, IN (e.contactDetails) as c WHERE c.phoneNumber like :p2");

etc. work - "querying on subclass attributes ..."

But is it a BUG or a FEATURE of hibernate ?? Can I rely on this feature existing in future versions of Hibernate ??