I am using hibernate annotations and want to map a relationship on a legacy database. I have an Account table and a Person table with a ManyToMany relationship between them defined by a Role table.

One of the Persons attached each account is specified as the primary owner and this is indicated by a flag on the Role table. Ideally this would be a foreign key from account to person and I could map a direct relationship using @ManyToOne from account to person but I am not at liberty to change the schema.

Is there a way I can map a ManyToOne relationship through the join table such that account.getPrimaryPerson() would return me the Person joined to this account by the Role where role.primaryFlag is true. There is only ever one Role attached to an account with this flag set.

I know how to get the primary person for a given account in HQL or using criteria but I would like to make it a method on the account and preferrable lazily loaded.

Regards
PSjoberg