I have a many-to-many Set mapping, and I want to order the set on a property of the associated class.

(Class Member has a Set 'categories' of class Category.. I want this set returned in order by Category.name).

I think I can't use "order-by" in the mapping, because that wants a column name in the table, which in this case is the association table. That's just not gonna work!

I could write a Comparator for class Category that does what I want, and specify it in a <set/@sort> attribute, right? Is that my only choice, or is there a better way?

Thanks a lot,
Mark

I meant to add... I'm using Hibernate 3.1 :-)

well, by using a comparator, the sorting is done in memory not in the db. So you can either have hibernate sort it using that comparator, or you can manually insert it into the tree set. Same thing, one just takes a little less code by you