I would like to determine the property name of my biDirectional relationship through the Metadata. I've tried using "property-ref" and discovered that "property-ref" is for something else.

For instance...

A has a set of B stored at a property name of "bSet"
B has an instance of A stored at a property name of "a"

I would like to obtain the property name "a" from the property "bSet" meta data and visa versa. Is this possible or do I have define this meta data is some other format. I would think you should be able to do this.

Hibernate does not *know* the name of the inverse property (it is never specified in the mapping document).

To give some context as to why I've requested this or why I believe it would be useful is because I attempting to build a dynamic persister based around my domain model in an effort to reduce code. To do this I am going to need to determine if a relationship has an inverse (already know how to do that) and the name of the inverse relationship (obviously cannot do). Do you think a feature such as this would make it into future releases?

Thanks for your quick response

Tim

Hi Triley,
I had the same need and have spent a little bit of time on it. I don't have an easy answer for you but possibly a simple workaround. I first tried the metadata route as it seems the most logical. I was going to attempt to do this by getting the collection 'key' column to match with the referenced property column. That wouldn't work in all cases, but seemed reasonable for mine. However, there's something funky with the metadata api. I just couldn't do something as simple as get the key value for the collection mapping. I could get a reference to my collection mapping, but not much else... most of the properties (like getKey()) always came back null.
So if you've done better there, please let me know... I'm really curious what's up.

Anyway, my little workaround has been to simply but my own meta tag under the collection with the value being the name of the property in the referenced class. For example...
<meta attribute="inverse-property">parent</meta>

Then, I can access this at runtime and all is good. If you need more details on how to do that, let me know.

Good luck.