Hi all!

I'd like to know how would you design a graph with Hibernate. Let me explain...

I have one class, Technology. This class has parents and childs (other Technology classes) to form a graph (i.e. a tree with nodes that have more than one parent). I'd like to navigate through this graph upside-down and bottom-up.

I have thought of two many-to-many relationships (parents and childs), but setting the inverse attribute I stopped. It seems to me that something's wrong. How can I choose an inverse=true end inside the same class types?

Is there a better and clever way to accomplish this?

You say that there's a fixed orientation, a definite "top" and "bottom". So you'll have two many-to-many collections, getChildren inverse="false" and getParents inverse="true". Don't cascade-delete: do "collection.remove(x); session.delete(x);" when you know that object x needs to be completely deleted.