I've tried searching for this with no avail. I probably just don't have the right terminology. I'm not sure of the approach to take on this so I'd appreciate some help stepping in the right direction.

My task is this: In our database we have a table that is designed (which I can't change, and 'shouldn't' be changed for efficiencies sake) so that one column contains a string of keys to another table separated by '/'s

eg. {key1}/{key2}/{key3}

My ultimate goal is to be able to parse out those keys into a set of Objects for which they are keys/ids to. I need to do it in a way that hibernate does all of the work so that the objects can be lazy loaded and query-able. Obviously for persistance sake I need to be able to do the reverse: create a string of keys from a Set of objects.

So far I can only guess that I'll be implementing my own UserCollection and possibly my own Collection persister.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated

-LiquidSix

Other than toying with hibernate internals, why not use the simple approach of defining lifecycle methods on your class. Map the column to some internal String, then in the onLoad() method, expand the String into a Set, and before saving in onSave(), compact the Set into the String.