Hi,
I have the following domain objects that I would like to map but can't figure out how.

There exist 3 classes that represent composite structures which hold information.
Following the composite pattern I have implemented:

InfoComponent: an abstract class which has propertied of id, name (the component class)
AtomicInfo: derives from InfoComponent, and can hold an object (the leaf class)
CompositeInfo: derives from InfoComponent and has a collection of InfoComponents. Serves as a "folder" where information or other folders as stored (the composite class)


Now, consider an instance of this composite and let's call it a "file". A file organises info in groups, so I can have a file that has a folder "Family status" which contains a AtomicInfo called "Married" which holds a boolean.

So far so good. Problem is that "people" entities have different "files" which share the same structure but have different values in the structure.

In my non-ORmapped db I use the folllowing table structures:
Table CompositeInfo has id, name and disciminator (to distinguish if a component is a leaf or composite)
Table ParentChild has the parent id, and child id columns that describe which components a composite holds.
Table PersonValues has a person id, a composite id, and the value that the information has for that particular leaf for that particular person.

Despite my efforts haven't got around in mapping this. How would you do it?
Thanks a lot, and excuse the length of this message:)

I think mapping InfoComponent to a class with its subclasses mapped using <subclass> should work. Then to map a collection of components and their values you could use a <map> with its index mapped using <index-many-to-many> to an InfoComponent. Did you try that? What were the problems?

Hi, in case your still wondering about how to solve this, I ran a small sample to help you. I didn't quite understand what the PersonValues table do but I can give you an example of how to map yur composite example.

Here goes the composite pattern with m-m relationship between parent and childs:

Thanks a lot for the reply, I'll try it out and let you know...

Well, so far not luck. Let's forget about persons and concentrate on the composite.
The closest I got was with the following map:




This gets me as far as inserting the composites but not updating the relationship table (composite x contains infocomponent)

Being a newbien in hibernate I really got this by playing around. So I don't have an understanding of why I need the inverse="true". Also I'm not sure about the correctness of the index-many-to-many and many-to-many.

Any further help will be really appreciated.
Thanks,
gg

PS. If you want I can strip down the code and include it here... I didn't cause I don't think it will really help...

Inverse basically says that the contained entity is responsible for the foreign key value. This means the contained entity should have the reference to its container (the inverse reference) and that reference is what is taken into account. Since your InfoComponents probably don't have pointers back to the composites they are contained in, you should try inverse="false", then the association should be updated.