Hi,

I'm trying to figure out a weird problem. Consider the following mapping:

<hibernate-mapping>
<class name="edu.ucsd.som.tracker.RoutingTracker" table="routing_tracker">

<id name="id" column="routing_tracker_id" type="long">
<generator class="native"/>
</id>

<!-- ... -->

<list name="stages" lazy="false" table="routing_stage" cascade="all">
<key column="routing_tracker_id"/>
<index column="routing_stage_id"/>
<one-to-many class="edu.ucsd.som.tracker.RoutingStage"/>
</list>
</class>

In sample data i'm using for testing, the "stages" collection should contain 3 items. I looked at the query Hibernate generate and it does return only three items as expected. However, if I look at the size of the list corresponding to the stages property (i.e. tracker.getStages().size() ), the size returned is not 3. Rather, it is always (seemingly) the number of highest record in the list. So if the query pulls records with numbers 3, 7, 14 from the routing_stage table, the collection size would be 14. The list would contain three correct stage items as expected (in the last three elements of the list) with the other elements set to null.

Has anyone seen this before? I'm obviously not defining something correctly.

looks like the expected behaviour if your index values have "gaps"

hmm... ok, is there anything I can do to have the collection return correct number of elements?

you shouldn't use routing stage id as your list index column
create a new database column solely for hibernate to store the index

thanks. i'll give it a try.

what can I read to better understand why this was happening?

never mind my last question. I figured it out. I misunderstood the meaning of "index" in this context. I actually already have a column that contains the array's index. Although, the indexes start with 1, not 0, but I can deal with this on the application leve.