I notice that PersistentCollectionType has a method to generically interate over the elements of a collection, but not the index values. Is there any particular reason for this?

I know that indexes are pretty much only useful for Maps, but the lack of a getIndexesIterator method seems comspicuously absent and I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing.

I hope you are never casting your collections to PersistentCollection! That is an internal Hibernate implementation class....

Nope, I'm talking about net.sf.hibernate.type.PersistentCollectionType here.

Well, the Hibernate core never needs to iterate over indexes, so it doesn't exist.

I thought as much.

I'm fairly close to done with a generic mechanism to calculate, store, retreive and reverse changes made during a hibernate session. Like a generic diff and undo. I could have used an interator over the indexes but I just cast a MapType object to a Map, so the key/value becomes the index/element pair.