Hi,
I have a basic question here. I couldn't understand the need for associations.
Would you please tell what we can achieve with associations which we can't if we don't use associations?

Kind Regards,
Sham.

You need Associations to establish relations-ships between persistent objects.
For example if you want map which Pets a determinate Persons owns,
then the best is to map it with an association


(How would you do implement it without assocciatons?)

Hi pb00067,

Thanks for the reply. I am writing her from my understanding, but not to contradict what you said.
The problem here is that I want pets belonging to one person if I haver person ID stored in Pets table as foreign key. I can query using HQL and get the pets
"from Pets pets where pets.personid = <personid>"

So may be the question. What are the pros if I use associations instead of this?
or
Is Associations used if there was no foreign key person ID in Pets table?

Kind Regards,
Sham.

OK, then speak about bidirectional OneToMany relation







One of the pro's are:
it is much more comfortable to call

than


Furthermore the collection of person.pets() can be configured to be cached into a 2Lcache implementation.
(For queries it is also possible but much lesser effective).

N.B.: How do you generate the schema with foreign keys without mapping associations ?
Is your database a pre-existing one which already has its fix schema?



I don't understand this question.
Anyway if you map the association like I showed in the first post,
then you would not have generated any foreign key in pet-table.