From my previous post, there doesn't appear to be a way to map Many-to-One without using primary keys. I have GUIDs that I need to map in a relationship structure, but they are not my primary keys.

Can someone please at least confirm if this is doable or not? Thanks.

can you at least explain db structure please?

The structure is very straight forward. I have an object called Package that contains a collection of PackageFile objects. Both of those objects have an id (Long) and a guid (String).

Those objects map to package and package_file tables. There is an FK in package_file to package on a column named package_guid.

I want to have a hibernate mapped collection where I can call getFiles() that will return a collection of PackageFile objects based on the Package.guid = PackageFile.package_guid relationship.

I can post some code / mapping file if you need them, but that's pretty much it. Many-to-one has a <key> tag to specify the column to use in the foreign table when you do not want to use the primary key. However there doesn't seem to be a way in hibernate to specify a non-primary key column to use in the parent table.

Am I missing something here?

My appologies to all about how I'm using the forums.

Overall Hibernate is pretty cool, but I think we're a special use case where we send related data across a web service using Hibernate at both ends. It just seems that Hibernate is not suited to this situation. So switching to another ORM like JDO might our best option.

I know the forums are free and developers like me are spending time helping when they can. Thanks to everyone that has helped in the past...

Good bye.