Hibernate version: 3.1
Name and version of the database you are using: Oracle 9i

I'm sure I'll end up looking like an idiot, but I've been spinning on this long enough that I don't care.

I'm trying to get Hibernate in the door for use by our time by trying it out on a very small application. A standard for our team is for user profile information to be published to each app we write from HR at the database level through a read-only view. App data is then associated with users using the employee ID we get from this HR employee profile view. I have no problems creating an object that (only) encapsulates direct access to this view. Unfortunately, a common task within all of our apps is to store information about people that always needs to be "joined" (at least that's what I do in the non-hibernate world) with the HR profile view using the employee ID. I can't for the life of me get this to work the way I'd expect with Hibernate.

For example, I'd like to create a domain object for employees associated with the project that displays information held in the HR profile view, where saving new instances of the object will create a new row in the AssociatedEmployee table (that probably only would have a single column for the employee ID). How would some of you hibernate veterans suggest I get started with this situation?

Create an immutable class for the read-only view table (<class name="EmployeeHRRecord" mutable="false" ...>). Put an instance of this class into your AssociatedEmployed class (which isn't immutable).