So assume you have two entities, School and Student and obviously there is a one to many relationship. But the student entity has a column called valedictorian, and one of these students has the value 'Y', whereas all the rest have 'N'. (or you can come up with some more complex way of determining that from the student entity, if that hurts your sensibilities).

What i'd like is to have a field on School



or something like that where i get a reference to one student out of a bunch of them based on the value of a field in that student entity.


Can i do this?

You know, I can't help but think this might not be done very easily with a simple Hibernate Query Language (HQL) or Hibernate Criteria Query. No?

My best guess is that you can use a Formula discriminator to do this, but the documentation isn't clear enough for my little head.