Hi,

I would like to save a big group of object with specific order that could be easily managed (just like a List )
I'm wondering if Hibernate list management (or something else) provides functinality to update ordered indexes ofto objects in a way that

- when I add a new element (in the middle of the list) the indexes wouldn't be changed one at time but with a some kind of "shift update" like "update TABLE set INDEX = INDEX + 1 WHERE INDEX > <index-of-added-element> instead of every index being changed one at time

- same thing with removing an element from the list

First I thought it could done with a list but after some thinking I ended up that it won't probably do it. The PersistentList seems to do some queuing with addition / removal operations but if I understood right, these aren't used with index updating? And so the list solution wouldn't update the indexes with "shift update", or?

Another possibility would be to handle the indexes separately with HQL/SQL UPDATE but then the in-memory state of the list/elements wouldn't be solved. (Ok, I could probably do it by hand..)

So, if anyone has ideas for a good solution that would be nice.

Still working on it,
-Touko

Hi again,

replying mostly to help if someone has similar needs and to ask if somebody has good point on doing things this way:

After some thinking and a little bit of prototyping one way to do the wanted thing could be something like that:

- Forget the automatic indexing & ordering with List and make the index column a normal property.

- Handle the indexes manually and do the shift operations with HQL resulting as something like


Even though legacy databases without much object orientation and with some mass operations don't seem to be the main target of Hibernate but it still seems that Hibernate would save a lots of work with the thing..