Hi,

I have a one to many relationship between 2 entities, let's say company and employee.

Let's say that in the database, there are 2 employees E1 and E2 sharing the same company C (id = 1).

I first load E1 and its company C1 (id = 1). I have E1.getCompany() = C1.

Then, I load E2 and I want to get its company also. My problem is that hibernate instanciates another instance of company : C2, with the same id (C1.id == C2.id) but, still, this is a different instance.

Is there any way to make it so that hibernate links E2 to the actual instance of company that was previously loaded ? That is to say C1 ?

I hope I am being clear here.

Tx.

Object identity is only guaranteed in session scope, and it is not possible to change that.

This is a nice presentation on identities - worth taking a look:

http://hibernate.org/~gavin/pdoi.pdf