Hibernate version: 3.1

Greetings,

I'm in the process of refactoring a legacy app we use in-house and thought I would integrate Hibernate. I have the following table schema and am having a heck of a time trying to figure out how to map it.



My original idea was to map the CATEGORY_* tables as joined-subclasses of the CATEGORY table each with a Set of their corresponding 'items'. The CATEGORY table is mapped as an abstract superclass to the CATEGORY_* tables/classes. This doesn't appear to work as the CATEGORY_* tables have their own primary key. Further, I don't think I'm approaching this correctly.

Am I even thinking about this properly?
Any suggestions on a different strategy to solve this?

Many thanks.

The category_* tables are join tables with their own primary key. This is almost a many-to-many mapping, except you have to implement separate classes for the category_* tables (because of the ID), and then have three one-to-many collections from category to those classes, and many-to-one unique="true" from each of those to the contact/note/list tables.

If you can configure your DB to autogenerated the ID columns of the category_* tables, then you can simply not map the ID columns, and make those simple many-to-many relationships, where the category_* tables are referred to only in the <set> elements in the category mapping.