Hi everyone. I seem to have a hard time finding any references on how to handle lookup tables in Hibernate. Does anyone have a practical example on how to do this? Some of the lookup data in my application is used for the UI. So I would like to pre-populate lookup lists on the start up of the application

Thanks,

Sergey

You should be more specific to get help.

What do you mean by 'lookup table'? Do you mean a table of entities with names, where you would like to populate lists used for dropdown controls or selects?

table
USER
-----------
ID (PK)
FIRST_NAME
LAST_NAME
......
STATE_LIST_ID (FK)

table
STATE_LIST
------------------------
ID (PK)
NAME


Sample Data

USER
-------------------------
John
Doe
...........
7


STATE_LIST
-----------------
7
CA

I am not sure what you mean by "selects". I have a list of standard lookup tables, (e.g, states, credit card types, etc) which are associated with User table and Credit_Card table, etc. I would like to use state and credit card type information in the dropdown, therefore I would like to pre-cache this data in advance. When credit card type or state is selected I would like to record it in the database, but I do not want to go back and remap CA to 7 in the User table

Thanks,

Sergey

read up on second-level caching

I think that Sergey want simple many-to-one relationship
It is enough that declare many-to-one in USER for STATE (for example) and set
lazy to false.Hibernate will populate lookup automatic.

regards
Peco

Right, it seems like something that can be done with a simple query or with relationship mappings, lazily loaded or not.

I mean selects as in HTML select tags with option tags in them.



I don't know what you mean by 'remap', but you can definitely avoid re-reading things from the database by enabling Hibernate's cache.

Hi Peco, not quite. There are two problems here.
1. Select dropdown data from the lookup table
2. When dropdown value is selected on the webpage commit it to the database as part of User record.

Since, lookup table does not change I do not want to reload them every time. Also, I would like to avoid creating objects for lookup tables if possible. Collection of State Objects would be a waste, since all they would contain is a single string. I would like to be able to map User Object to USER and STATE_LIST tables at the same. I know it is not possilbe in Hibernate 2, but 3 allows one to many mapping between objects and tables.

Thanks,

Sergey

Sergey,
2 will hibernate do with many-to-one, but for task 1 you have to create any object (collection)
for every lookup table
Is lookup table from oracle vocabulary ?

regards

Thanks for your response. I do not think that lookup pertains specificaly to Oracle. It is just another data modeling technique for externalizing common data like states, countries, etc.

Thanks,

Sergey

I haven't told that is oracle specific.I think that you work with oracle, only - they use this termin
it is more relational, less object oriented
regards