I'm migrating from Castor to Hibernate and have a question about how to navigate many-to-many-to-many relations in HQL.

The datastructure of my application is like this:

Item -- Collection -- Acl -- Role -- User

(all relations are many-to-many).

Now, in Castor I could write something like:

SELECT i FROM Item i WHERE i.id = $1 AND i.collection.acl.role.user.username = $2

in order to retrieve all items that a particular user has access to.

When I try something similar with Hibernate I get this error message:

net.sf.hibernate.QueryException: expecting 'elements' or 'indices' after: acl

Here is the Hibernate query that fails:
select i from Item as i where i.id = ? and i.collection.acl.role.user.id = ?

Is it possible to navigate through more than one many-to-many relation in Hibernate? If so, how? The database I use is MySQL 4.0.

Thanks
Per Thomas

try explicit link via inner join

from a inner join a.collection b inner join b.role c ...

Thanks - that worked!

Per Thomas