Is there a way to map a unidirectional one-to-one relationship using a unique foreign key constraint where the foreign key column resides in the table for the target of the relation instead of the source? For example, consider the bidirectional relationship in the documentation, section 5.1.11:



How can you model the same relationship if the Employee class has no property pointing back to the person (the many-to-one prop doesn't exist)?

Dave[/code]

Not possible AFAIK. You might be able to use a workaround by using a many-to-one mapping, it might be tricky but possibly work ...

I don't think many to one will work either, the FK is on the other table.
Conceptually, this is a one-to-many.

Map it as a one-to-many with private accessor and add an unmapped public getter/setter that do the tricky stuff (update the one-to-many association)

Thanks for the suggestions. The FK is only in the target table to overcome a deadlock problem with the next leading brand of ORM tool. I'll move the key back to the source table and run some junit tests to make sure Hibernate can hack it.

Thanks, Dave

Just out of curiosity, is the type of mapping described above (foreign key in target table) an uncommon one, and used primarily in many-to-one mappings?

This is pretty uncommon in the way described. In the relation model, it's done to design many-to-one