I am confused about how I should be thinking about this very basic association: A USER table and a ROLE table. Obviously, each user has many roles. The USER is obviously an Entity class, but the ROLES table I think should be a static table that is loaded from a file because it will never change and the ID column needs to be fixed...so this makes me believe that there should not be a ROLE entity.

What is the proper way to think about this?

And if I do use a static table for roles, how do I incorporate static tables using Hibernate? If I use hbm2ddl to export my schema, how do I deal with static tables?

Thanks for any help you can give to clarify my thinking on this!

John

If you want to use a table in Hibernate you need to map it to an entity. You can make it almost read-only if you set <class ... mutable="false" ... />.

Role will be an entity only coz it has its own properties and existence. Only thing is that once initialized, you wont be making any updations to the role table. So for the mapping part you will map it like any other table.



Well hbm2dll will only handle the creation of the table. Population of the data should be handled by your application code. Probably you can do this in ur application initialization code.