Hi,

I have a class A and B with many-to-many relationship.

The associate class is A_B.

However, my associate class contains some properties. In this case

how do I specify the many-to-many relationship in hbm.xml.


Do I have to break them up as two many to one relationship and create the A_B class.

Thanks
Shishir

such an association A<*---*>B is usually broken into

an association like this:
A--*>AB<*--B

this results in two <one-to-many> mapping xmls.

Thanks Ravi. What I wanted to know was that is there any way in hibernate where I can mention properties for many-to-many tag in the hbm.xml for class A or class B rather than having to have a separate class definition for AB and then doing a one-to-many from A to AB and one-to-may from B to AB.

Shishir

You can use a collection of composites. This is quite complex, but you need at least the association class. It is then mapped as a <composite-element>.

So, breaking up the relation into two "one-to-many" and defining the associate class would be the way to go (best practices) from the point of view of complexity of using the many-to-many (only if the associate class has properties) ?

Shishir

If you are new to Hibernate, yes.

Thanks for the input. Guess I shall stick to the easier path and leave the fancier stuff for sometime later :).

Cheers!!