Working on a retrofit of an existing Toplink-based project to Hibernate. The data model requires some data to be associated with a join, and the only way I've been able to make it all work is to specify the join table as a domain object and manage it directly, which is sort of ugly.

Role has 1-many to UserRoleAssociation has many-1 to User (Role has many-many to User)
UserRoleAssociation currently has the Role and User ids plus a one-many relationship to a CustomData class

Is there a way to deal with this situation in Hibernate and preserve the ability to ask the User for his Roles and vice-versa, rather than having to query the association table as I'm doing currently?

Seems to me you could have mappings for User and Role, and in each mapping use a <join table> mapping to relate the one to the other via the UserRole table. See the hibernate documentation for how to do this:

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/re ... ional-join

jh