Are there plans to add many-to-one filtering?

A common use is to filter on historical data as in the effective date example in the documentation. Filters work well if you are filtering against a collection or a class. The problem is that I also have many-to-one objects that are not supported by filters.

An example, might be an Invoice with a Customer object in a many-to-one relationship. I could apply the filter to the to the Invoice to get a snapshot of the invoice at a point in time, but how can I get it to load the corresponding Customer information for the same point in time?

Is there a recommended solution to this type of problem in the current version of Hibernate? I've tried using loader in the class, but it doesn't seem to use it.

I also thought of loading the "Customer" into a collection and pulling out the object in the "Invoice" class, but that seems like a hack. For example,

private Customer customer;

public setCustomer(Customer customer)
{
this.customer = customer;
}

public Customer getCustomer()
{
return customer;
}

public void setCustomerList(List<Customer> customers) {
setCustomer(customers.get(0));
}

The customer would then be mapped as a <set> instead of a <many-to-one>.

I agree.

From looking through the forum archives, it seems there have been a few requests but no real feedback from the hibernate team or the community.

Is there something fundamentally preventing the implementation, or is there a more appropriate way of handling these cases.

Gavin/Christian/Max, etc. ?


Our particular case involves an application where the data is never actually removed from the table, instead it's flagged and a filter is applied for our set/one-to-many/many-to-many's. Longer term we'd obviously like to remove that deleted data into archive tables, but that's not on the agenda right now.

This process is working fairly well for all cases except for the many-to-one.


Any ideas/comments?


Thanks

I am interested in an answer as well.

There are patches floating around that add filters to many-to-one relations, but I found no explanation why they were not added to any release yet.

We do not have historical data but data that depends on the language (and some more attributes), tables look like this one:



Every entity that references above entity references the non unique code, that is why a many-to-one relationship without filter throws an exception.

Is there a possible workaround? The database design is fixed, I have no influence on that.


Thanks,
Thomas

Our project would need this feature as well. I think if hibernate would implement s.th. like this to support temporal datamodels it would be a nice additional feature that competitors don't have.