I was tryin to map a collection of Car objects using a list. I could map them to the table however i could not generate a surrogate key.

@Entity
@Table(name= "garage")
public class Garage {

@Id @GeneratedValue
@Column(name = "garage_id")
private long id;
@org.hibernate.annotations.CollectionOfElements(
targetElement = Car.class)
@JoinTable(
name = "car",

joinColumns = @JoinColumn(name= "garage_id"))

@Column(name ="carname")
private List<Car> auto = new ArrayList<Car>();

*********************************************
@Embeddable
@Table(name ="car")
public class Car {

/*@Id @GeneratedValue
@Column(name = "car_id")
private long id;*/

@Column(name ="name" )
private String name;
@Column (name ="sex")
private String sex;
@org.hibernate.annotations.Parent
private Garage garage;


can anyone help me on how to map the list so that it generate a surrogate primaey key on the collection side table. right now it has a foreign key referencing with garage_id.

AFAIK the only way to get this is to do an actual entity association rather that a collection of elements. Even Hibernate core (without annotations) requires all the elements to have non-null fields because it uses compound keys.