for the life of me i can't find this.

What do you mean by "role tag"? Do you mean role attribute of collection mappings? This does no longer exist, it is now called name

yes, the attribute of collection mappings. ah, it doesn't exist. i was trying to do my homework and read old posts, and found example with the role attribute. thank you. answered my question.

if you happen to have an updated example of a collection of components, please let me know. i was using the one from http://www.xylax.net/hibernate/composite.html which is obsolete i guess. thanks.

There is an example in the hibernate documentation at http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/reference/html/collections.html#collections-s1-5 (just before chapter 6.4)