Hello,

I have a text_value table with "chunked" text in a legacy database. The text table resembles the following:

txt_id (collection identifier)
txt_ord (ordinal index)
txt_value (string field)

In another table (tableA) that populates a class (classA) I have a field that references the string value in the text table:

my_txt_id (foreign key to text_value table)
table_a_id (primary key)

I'd like to populate a List of Strings in classA from the text_value table using my_txt_id as a foreign key.

I did not see anywhere in the documentation how to specify distinct column names for the primary key in the collection table and the foreign key in the "owning" table. I did discover the apparently undocumented foreign-key attribute of the key element, and tried the following:

<list name="myTextChunks" table="text_value">
<key column="txt_id" foreign-key="my_txt_id" />
<index column="txt_ord" />
<element column="txt_value" type="java.lang.String" />
</list>

However, this did not do what I had hoped. Instead of joining the text_value.txt_id to tableA.my_txt_id, it is joining text_value.txt_id to tableA.table_a_id (the id of the owning class).

Should this have worked?

Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks,
John

Please refer to the Hibernate documentation and examples.

Could you please point me at where in the documentation it discusses how to create a relationship between an owning table and a collection table where the collection table's primary key is not joined to the primary key of the "owning" table? I have read through the relevent chapters of the documentation several times and have not found the answer, maybe I'm not looking in the right place.

I did find documentation on top-level collections at http://www.xylax.net/hibernate/toplevel.html, and this would seem to provide the mapping I want. Alas, it appears that this feature has been removed from hibernate 2.0.

John

Oh, this is not supported. In a properly designed relational model, all foreign keys reference primary keys, of course. We do support this for <many-to-one>, but we probably shouldn't.

P.S. Please be clearer next time. TIA.