Complex Many to Many Relationship Mapping?

oblivionsy · **Joined:** Fri Jun 01, 2007 4:55 pm **Posts:** 24

Hibernate version: 1.2.0

I am wondering if someone would be kinda enough to perhaps provide a suitable mapping for this structure of classes.

I have a class Webiste That has properties and a collection of Website Tests. This is a many to many relationship (therefore the database has an association table. Fairly straight forward so far - now in that association table I am storing other information - such as the date a test was added to a website, whether the test is enabled. So that association table has some other data too, other than just linking the two tables.

I guess what i want to achieve is to have my Website object, have a property of tests (which is a strongly typed collection) and in the collection have Website Test objects which contains information about the test and information relating to that test linked with the website (such as date)

Shout if that doesn't make any sense (vb syntax preferred, but wont turn down any help!)

oblivionsy · **Joined:** Fri Jun 01, 2007 4:55 pm **Posts:** 24

Here is a table structure; might help with what i mean:

Code:

[b]Websites[/b]
WebsiteID    Name
1            hotmail.com
2            builtonrock.co.uk



[b]Tests[/b]
TestID         Description
6              PING
9              Render



[b]WebsiteTestSettings[/b]
WebsiteID         TestID          Frequency       Status
1                 6               60              1
1                 9               180             1
2                 6               30              0 

The website Test settings does your usual Many-to-Many relationship handling, but it also has some extra values.

I not even sure where to start mapping something like that.

IgorK · **Posted:** Sun Jun 10, 2007 1:16 pm

Hi oblivionsy!

You'd better create 3 classes and use simple many-to-one and one-to-many associations.

oblivionsy · **Joined:** Fri Jun 01, 2007 4:55 pm **Posts:** 24

I considered that, but ruled it out cos a website doesnt just have website test Settings, it also has the test information too. I need to be able to merge those two together somehow. Also, the relationships are not necessarily directly reversible. A website would have a collection of tests + their settings. But a test would only have a collection of websites (so those extra fields could be ignored) - can this still be done like that?