I have a legacy table that I can not break up in the database and am attempting to figure out a way to map the table to different objects with a one-to-many relationship to those objects.

For example:

This table consists of data such as Language1, Language2, Language3...etc upto 15. Right now I am mapping all 15 Language fields to one object along with all the other properties of that object.

public class PersonalInfo
{
...
public string Name {...}
public IList<Address> Addresses {...}
...
public string Language1 {...}
public string Language2 {...}
}

What I would rather do is transform a LegacyLanguage object to a CollectionLanguage object (i.e. IList<Language> Langauges). I have not been able to think of a good way to do this that is sensible and is not TOO dirty. This way the UI developer can repeat the Languages on the UI without having to bind each individual Language.

Please help! I apologize if everything I am saying is very random, but I am truly working on very little sleep. We're on a very short deadline considering we're preparing for hurricane season which is coming up June 1st.

You can't map multiple columns to elements in a collection. However, you can map them all separately, and provide a collection or array that is backed by those 15 get/set methods. That would satisfy both hibernate and your API requirements.

I don't know how to write backed collections in whichever .NET language you're using. In java, you'd extend AbstractList, overriding the get, add, remove and size methods (so languageList.get(7) would return internalLanguage7, etc.). Hope that helps.

That is _exactly_ what I was looking for. I am blushing a bit as this is way too simple. I think I'm over complicating things from exhaustion.

Thank you VERY much!!

Once again, thank you very much!

Here is what I did incase someone else has this same question. Basically I followed your guidelines exactly. I created a private arraylist of language objects. I then created a LegacyLanguages class where each get/set assigns/inserts to the appropriate index of the private arraylist. I created a public get for the arraylist. Now the UI developer can use the LegacyLanguages collection as a legacy object or access the exposed arraylist for the non-legacy class Language.

Thanks again!

You're welcome. You could rate my post, that's a more tangible reward :)