i'm sure somebody following the top-design must have faced this problem during the generation of hibernate mapping xmls from pojo code marked with xdoclet tags.

in the Employee class i mark getName() as @hibernate.component. i mark all the getters in the Name class as @hibernate.property. when i give this an <hibernatedoclet> spin, i'll end up with a generated xml something like this.



now if have another getter in Employee let's say getMotherName() which also returns a Name object. so i mark that with @hibernate.component as well.

now we get:


not surprisingly this causes causes :
[STDERR] net.sf.hibernate.MappingException: Repeated column in mapping for class com.alterpoint.aof.objects.platform.impl.ManagedElementImpl should be mapped with insert="false" update="false": firstName

does there seem to be a major flaw in my usage (though generated). how do i map multiple fields to the same <component>.

thanks
ravi

There is no easy solution :(

the best alternative is to break it out and not use the @component concept for complex return types which occur more than once in a class. so instead of returning a complex type Name, i just model a separate object called Name and have relationships between Employee and Name (called name and motherName).

the other technique is to simply mark the complex type as @hibernate.property and make sure Name implement Serializable. this approach is acceptable if you don't need to directly make queries on the primitive value (String) that Name encapsulates. this is of course because Name will be a unusalbe blob in the database until it is deserialized.