Hi There,

This is prob a basic question but finding it hard to find a good answer.

I have three tables.

A user table
A menu table

a user_to_menu table.

The user_to_menu table just contains an ID, USERID,MENUID,

Sampel Date

id userid menuid
2 5 1
2 5 2
2 5 3
2 5 4

I think i am wrong in the way i am populating this object.

First i save a user and get his generated ID
Then i retrieve the menu id's he entitled to eg 1,2,3,4

Then a i create 4 usertomenu objects with user id the same but menu id different and save this to the database.

While it achieves what i need, i dont think it is the best way to do it?

Any tips

I would suggest reading through the Hibernate In Action book to understand the concepts of hibernate better. I don't necessarily understand things completely, but here is my take on it:

You dont ever deal with IDs when you are working with hibernate. the mapping table of [id, id, id] will be entirely transparent to your code. You will do something like this, assuming User<->Menu is a bi-directional many-to-many relationship:



then your hibernate XML file is set up to tell hibernate how to save that down to the right tables, including the ID mapping table and what type of cascading to do. The book has examples.

dan