Hello,

This isn't really a problem, I just need to know how to do it. I have tried to search and tried a few things, unfortunately I think the biggest problem I am having is I don't know what I am really looking for to even try to do a good search, I assume this is a simple problem.

Situation:

Lets assume I have 2 tables, one called Article, the other called Category. Article contains content of a article and a category code article (i.e., 01=sports). It has a foreign key into the Category table, obviously.

SO, when I get a set of articles obviously it returns the category code in the bean, i.e., getCategory returns "01". How can I get it to return the string description from the Category table instead of the Category code stored in the Article table, i.e., getCategory returns "Sports"?

I put together a quick hack together to fix the immediate problem that just gets all the categories and then goes through each Article object and replaces it and I know there is no reason for me to do it this way because I know it can be down via hibernate.

Again, I am sure this is super simple, but I appreciate the direction.

So in your Category table, you'd have two columns for example. categoryID and categoryName.

You'd have two hibernate mapping files, one for Article and one for Category.
The mapping file will generate two Java POJO, Article.java, and Category.java.

I assume you'd want a Many-One relationship from Article to Category (i.e. many articles can be in the same category).

In the Article mapping file you'd specify the foreign key relationship, for example:



What this says is that in the Article entity, you have a property called "category" which is actually a foreign key to the Category (using the categoryid column).

Now whenever you load an Article through hibernate, you can do Article.getCategory().getCategoryName(). As you can see, hibernate maps the Category object in.

Hope that hepls.

That makes sense!

I appreciate the input.