I have the follwing entities

1. Category
2. Sub- Category
3. Product
4. Attributes
5. Item

Category may contain zero or many sub-cats.
Sub-category may contain zero or more products.
Product have the many to many relation with Attributes.
and Product may contain the zero or many items.

Here the problem comes. Here the Item is like an instance of the Product.so it contains the values of the product attributes.

I have created tables Product , Attribute and Product_Attribute. Now when it comes to Item i am not able to proceed.

I think hibernate users will me in this.

Thanks in advance.

Rao.