Hibernate version: 2

Hello, I have a question on how hibernate handles Lists. Our application has an object, say A, with an ordered collection of items (say a list of B objects) on it. We are supposed to persist the order in which the user adds B's to A, hence we are using a List. I fully understand that hibernate requires you to add an integer index column in the B table to keep track of the order of the List. My question is 'is there any way to have hibernate populate the index column automatically when it persists the List'? Currently we have to iterate over the List before persisting it and set the appropriate index on each item. This is fine, but it sucks having to put this DB-specific code in our objects and I would think this could be handled transparently by hibernate. Is there a better way to handle this?

Thx,
Andy

Hibernate automaticly writes the index to the table when you persist the List collection. You will notice that index is not an attribute of your bean but it only exists in your table to assist Hibernate to find the index of the element in the List.
Your mapping should be like this:


Hope this helps.

Thanks for the reply, Dencel. I tried exactly what you said, but hibernate was leaving the index as 0 for every item. Consequently when I loaded the list from the DB, I would only get one of the items (presumably because they are all 0 and were being overwritten). The only way I was able to get it to work was to manually set the index prior to persisting. Any idea what I might be doing wrong? Here is a snippet from the xml file:

<list name="recordingMedia" cascade="all" inverse="true">
<key column="sessionId"/>
<index column="indx"/>
<one-to-many class="com.blah.RecordingMedia"/>
</list>


When I save a List of these recording media objects, the indx column is left at zero for every item. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

THANK YOU!!!