I can't seem to find support for this.

I'm working with a system that would have over 20 many-to-many relationships, so I'm trying to consolidate a few...

For instance, I have a Person object. It has 5 many-to-many relationship sets to other entities and data types. So I would like to have one mapping table for all of the many-to-many relationships associated with the Person.

So my PersonDetail mapping table has columns like PersonId, ReferenceId, Category.

So for example, I have a PublishTo set that I want to map. And it's Category will be 'Publish'. How do I specify that? I can specify my key and many-to-many relationship no problem like:

but I can't specify another column to populate. I tried using where="Category='Publish'" in my set definition, and that works for retreiving the data, but doesn't work when I try to insert or update. It just leaves the Category field null.

Anyone know a solution for this?

Okay, so I have found a workaround solution.

I have created and intermediary class called PersonPublish. This uses Publish as a delegate pretty much. The PersonPublish class has a property for Category and a property for a Publish object. It also implements the Publish class. And overrides all of its methods by getting the value of the Publish property's properties. The class looks like this:


And I updated my hbm.xml set to use a composite-element!



And it seems to work well enough because the PersonPublish class is hidden from the user and it can still cast to Publish which it does have access to. Just sucks to have the intermediary class... If anyone knows a better solution, I'm all ears!