After reading the document and studying examples, I haven't find a similar case example. I would lilke to know a good approach for the following case.

An object A contains a list of items. This object will be frequently updated through out the live time of the application. In each update, only the list of items is changed. The application has a fixed set of such objects. And I consider to let the application assign an ID to the object instead of generated one by the backend.

I know this can been done by the conventional Hibernate method, which is an object A with one-to-many mapping to the items that have their own IDs. I would like to know whether is another approach or not.

Thanks for your inputs in advance.

v.

so object "A" never changes, just its children? If so let hibernate gen the ids for the children and use cascade prop to get children updated/inserted/deleted (what ever your need is).
Does this answer your question? Do you need more information? if so be more specific.
Thanks,
B

Thanks for your response.

You're right. The attributes of the object A, which are ID and name, are never changed once it is created. To the object A, a updating operation is to have a new list of items. The DB operation for the items is a pair of deletion and insertion. And the item list has to be ordered.

so what is your question? :)