Hi,

It seems like there may be a documentation error in the "HIBERNATE - Relational Persistence for Idiomatic Java" document (in both html and PDF)

See
http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/reference/en/html/associations.html#assoc-bidirectional-join-m2m

From the document:
==================
8.5.3. many to many

Finally, we have a bidirectional many-to-many association.

<class name="Person">
<id name="id" column="personId">
<generator class="native"/>
</id>
<set name="addresses">
<key column="personId"/>
<many-to-many column="addressId"
class="Address"/>
</set>
</class>

<class name="Address">
<id name="id" column="addressId">
<generator class="native"/>
</id>
<set name="people" inverse="true">
<key column="addressId"/>
<many-to-many column="personId"
class="Person"/>
</set>
</class>

create table Person ( personId bigint not null primary key )
create table PersonAddress ( personId bigint not null, addressId bigint not null, primary key (personId, addressId) )
create table Address ( addressId bigint not null primary key )
==================

It seems that the table attribute is missing in the <set> tag.
ie, the above example should be:

<class name="Person">
<id name="id" column="personId">
<generator class="native"/>
</id>
<set name="addresses" table="PersonAddress">
<key column="personId"/>
<many-to-many column="addressId"
class="Address"/>
</set>
</class>

<class name="Address">
<id name="id" column="addressId">
<generator class="native"/>
</id>
<set name="people" table="PersonAddress" inverse="true">
<key column="addressId"/>
<many-to-many column="personId"
class="Person"/>
</set>
</class>


I am new to Hibernate, so I may be wrong. But I was only able to make my code work for a similar many-to-many mapping after adding the table attribute.

Hope this helps.

You are right! The link table should be specified.

Fixed