We have the following simplified domain model:



How shall we map the title and description properties of the Question entity given the referenced TranslatedText values should have composite semantics?

Thanks!

What have you tried so far?

Well, I tried a few things:

- Map TranslatedText as a component within Question and then map Translation with a one-to-many within the component.



The problem with this approach is that I did not found a way to add an additional property_name column (which value would hard-code to 'title' in this case) to form a composite foreign key. The foreign key can't only be entity_id because Question will have several TranslatedText properties. I tried to add an additional <column name="property_name" default="'title'"/> within <key>, but it failed with this error so I guess that Hibernate can only map the association with the parent entity ID:

Foreign key (FKF5B39A91131961AF:Translation [entity_id,property_name])) Translation [entity_id,property_name])) must have same number of columns as the referenced primary key (Question [id])

- I also tried the "typed" one-to-one association discussed in here https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/tree/master/hibernate-core/src/test/java/org/hibernate/test/onetoone/formula, but from what I understood it requires the value object to have a reference back to it's parent which makes no sense at all: it's like asking to put a parent object reference into a Date or an Integer.

I'm pretty sure I overlooked something, but I just cannot find a way to map the current model. Hopefully there is one way to do it and if there is is one we also need to make sure that the Question entity owns the relationship because I want value semantics so that the Question's concurrency version gets incremented if we change it's title or description.

I managed to get something close to what I want by mapping TranslatedText using a many-to-one within Question. It works well, but I'll have to implement a custom solution to deal with orphan removal.

Ideally I'd map everything as dependend objects (components). The only thing that prevents me from doing it is that I could not find a way to properly map the translations because we need some kind of discriminator in there that is not part of the model and must be used to form a composite foreign key.


Adding a type property to TranslatedText would probably work, but it would make the model quite ugly, having to do:



We could abstract that by creating concrete `Title` and `Description` classes, but that may potentially lead to an explosion of classes.

EDIT: I couldn't find a way to map everything as dependent objects, even with concrete distinct Title and Description classes.

Why don't you use annotations? They are better supported than legacy HBM mappings.

I thought XML mapping files were equally powerful to annotations? How would you solve this problem with annotations? TBH I really dislike annotations as they pollute the model with persistence concerns, mixing up levels of abstraction.

The legacy HBM mappings are less powerful than Annotations, and there might be features that are not very well supported by the legacy mappings. In Hibernate 6, we plan on adding custom extensions to the JPA mappings, so you can also use the XML mappings if you like, but also benefit from Hibernate-specific features.

That's great news, but that still doesn't answer my question. Perhaps the question is better explained on StackOverflow.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4273 ... -hibernate