I hope the question is clear enough. I have been struggling with this for days. It appears to me that there is absolutely no way, using current Hibernate Annotations 3.1beta8, to persist any java.util.Map in which the values are entities.

I just want to know whether I am correct. I understand that this is clearly labeled "beta", I know that there is an issue in JIRA that says "Support Map". The reason I keep trying to figure out how to do it is that people have alluded to possible workarounds. But I can't see what they are. I understand now that I cannot use @CollectionOfElements. I see in JIRA that @MapKey is not supposed to work with @ManyToMany, but when I try to omit @MapKey, I get a complaint at runtime.

So it seems like there is just absolutely no way to use H Annotations on a class that has Map members whose values are not embeddable objects. Is this true? Or can someone please enlighten me as to a possible workaround?

Many thanks.

Hi,
I have an entry on my blog about maps persistence. mybe it would help you
http://jroller.com/page/eyallupu?entry=using_annotations_to_persist_java

There are examples in the unit test suite. 95% of example are meant to be human readable.

Nice blog eyall, I've linked it from the FAQ