K, I'm revisiting Hibernate for the first time since early versions of 2. I'm trying to figure out how to do bi-directional mapping via an array.

The last time I tried to do this I used the child primary key for my list-index. This caused the resulting child array to have many empty elements.

My question is what are people using to poulate the list-index? I'm using MySQL so I don't have the option of using ROWNUM. Do I need an actual column in the child table for list-index, and how are you updating the values of the column per query? Can I just use a variable in the child class without the db column?