Hi,

I have a situation where I have a lot of existing objects in the database that get created elsewhere.

I have other objects which have a one-to-many relationship with these child objects. They are defined as a List association in the parent, and mapped in the database through a link table.

I really don't want to load all the child objects, add them to the parent, and then save the parent to link them together. But getting the child id's for the parent, and saving them directly to the link table with teh parent id, seems wrong.

What is the Hibernate way to do this?

cheers,

David

Does anyone have any idea on this, please?

cheers,

David

Let me see if I understand what you are trying to do:

You have objects that get created elsewhere, but whatever creates them does not create the linking table entry?

In that case, I see three options (two you mentioned):

1. load the unassociated Java objects, link them, and persist (you said)
2. do direct SQL on the link table to update (you said)
2a. this could be done in the application as JDBC, or..
2b. this could be handled as DB triggers or DB job if there is an automated way to do it.
3. have the external applications that create the objects create the relation. (This could be combined with 2b maybe)

(1) does seem to be the hibernate way. The reason it seems so funky is that your data is being manipluated outside the app and left in a somewhat inconsistant state.

(2) seems fine to me, unless you need application GUI to handle things

(3) if possible seems the best in terms of data consistancy, imho
or (2b) if you cannot count on the other applications

dan