How do I sort a many-to-many collection mapped as a Map using filter?

For example, if I have a map between Student and Class with 'priority' as the map key.

and I want to sort the list of Classes for a student based on the class name. (the sorting criteria is decided by the user at runtime)

looks like when I use the resulting collection is a List (!) containing elements of Class in the specified order, which is great except I cannot retrieve the Map key (priority) any more.

Any help would be greatly appreciated....

I have not played with filtering of a Map, so I'm not sure its even doable. What I have done instead is to use a java.util.SortedMap (or mapped the Map collection with an appropriate sorter). Would this work for you?

we it does work... the collection that comes back is a List in the desired order, except of course without the Map key...

A SortedMap would not work because I want to sort on the fields of the value, not the key.

I havn't tried this, but it should work:


select index(this), this order by this.name asc

which will return a List of ordered pairs.

(Hibernate 2.1 only.)