I have a fundamental question about how to use Hibernate.

I have a class Group with a many-to-one relationship with Person. The group class is an agregation composed of various class attributes, one being a User. When the datatbase scripts are generated the resulting entities are Group with a foriegn key named User_Id (Long) and of course User.

If I want to create a new Group and I know the ID of the user that will be associated with that Group, what are my options for saving the Group? From what I can see, I have no option but to first do a load of the User using the user_id, then associate the user object with the new Group object, and then save it. Is there a better/more efficient way of doing this? Shouldn't I be able to simply insert the new Group with the appropirate User_id into the database? Are there best practices around this, or am I doing it just as it should be done?

Thanks for your help!
Aaron.

In that case, you can use a nice trick: Just create a new dummy User with the ID you have, set it on the Group, save the Group. Hibernate will only look for the ID in the User object and use it to save the Group. Make sure you don't cascade any operations on the association from Group to User.

Hum, not that the *best* way to create a "dummy" user is to enable proxies and do session.load(User.class, id), which does *not* hit the db.