I was wondering if Hibernate could be configured to handle the following situation. I know of one solution that will probably work the best, but was just curious as to that capabilities of Hibernate.

A person can have many jobs. Each job has a load of information about it (a job object is realtively large). I do not want my user object to hold a Collection of job objects for this reason. However, I would like the user object to hold a Collection of job titles (Strings). The database structure would be a standard user table --< user_jobs >-- job. The job table holds job titles. I am aware of how to map user to jobs, but not how to only pull out only the job_title from the job object.

Also, to add complication, what if I wanted something from a table further joined off of jobs - like the city which is connected through a zip-code lookup table?

The solution I mentioned above would be to create a view that would summarize the information I need, and map that view with a many-to-one in the user mapping. Is this the best/only way to accomplish this?

I see how that would work, but I like the view solution better. Having a Job object extend JobTitle or having a JobInfo object that simply wraps one String seems unnecessary (although I can't really offer a good reason why).

By sending that link, I assume there is no way to do what I asked in a mapping. Something like:

I went with a view and retrieving the data worked perfectly fine. However, since Hibernate flushes data from memory to the database at certain times, if I update the property being populated from a view, I get an SQL error (non-updatable view) which I totally expect and understand. Is there a way in hibernate to prevent a Collection from being a persisted property? I know the <property> tag has update="false" and insert="false", but I don't see a similar item for a set.

My user object holds a set of String "accesses". I have mapped it as follows:



where the table is actually a view in SQL server.

If I add an access to the in-memory user (temporary access granted), I do not want it saved (and cannot get it saved given this setup). My code does not break when I do this, but an error is logged. Is there a way around this?

inverse="true"

Okay, that works fine.
Separately, I have an affiliation object mapped as follows:



If I set the set "accesses" with inverse="true", the accesses will be read-only and not updated in the database even if they are in memory, correct? I will say I didn't think so, originally, but my attempts to prove my thoughts were fruitless.

Now, let's assume again here I wish to add a temporary access (or delete one) to an affiliation object, say until the user confirms that the change should be made. In order to have a confirmation UI, I must generate a copy of the retrieved affiliation, manipulate/display that version, and then save it to the session (using one "Long Session")? Optionally, I can use two sessions, destroying the original session after retrieval, modifying the retrieved object, opening a new session, and updating it with the original object (which has been altered), right?

And this works fine as long as I don't evict the parent from the cache. Doing so causes all the children (accesses) to be deleted from the database. Is there a way to evict an ENTIRE object, or do I somehow have to evict an objects children, then the object (or does that cause deltion problems, as well)?

Most of the examples I saw in the documentation refered to <many-to-many> and <many-to-one> sets, not <elements>.