I've got a SQL table in Oracle with a primary key that's generated by a sequence.

But that same table has a unique constraint on several columns in that same table that is NOT designated as a primary key. It could be considered an alternate key, but I wanted to use a surrogate key in my design.

It's easy enough to specify the surrogate key in Hibernate and XDoclet, but how do I also specify this unique constraint that's NOT a key? Is it possible?

The <composite-id> seems to be for tables with a composite key, and that's not strictly true in my case. - MOD

Did a search on the forum and found this:

http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.ph ... constraint

Looks like unique constraints should be maintained by the database. That means hand editing the schema that I generate from XDoclet/Ant, but I think I'd have to do that anyway.

Sorry for not doing the search first. - MOD

Maybe I gave up too soon.

Is the Hibernate XDoclet @hibernate.column tag what I'm looking for? Is that the way to specify that columns A, B, and C together comprise a unique constraint in a table?

Where do they go in the Java source? The @hibernate.column tag is a method-level tag. Which getter does it go with - getA(), getB(), getC(), or all of them? - MOD

This topic is irrevelent in your case, Actually, that's what you wanted to do, let hbm2ddl generate the unique constraint in your DB.

I don't know hbm2ddl enough to know how to do what you want, there's still hope :)

I'm afraid @hibernate.column unique="true" on several columns will create several 1-column contraints, have a quick try however.