I'm attempting to create a one-to-many collection that is joined on an arbitrary column of the parent table rather than on the primary key. That is, I want the following tables:

Parent


Where rather than parentOtherId being a foreign key to uniqueId of the Parent table, it's a foreign key to the otherId column of Parent. That is, when loading the children of parent the SQL executed is something along the lines of


I've been unable to find a way of mapping this relationship so that hibernate will load the collection appropriately. Rather than load

The reason I want this odd mapping is I wish to maintain a version history of all changes to the mapped objects. Unfortunately the history table solution suggested in a number of forum posts won't work as I need to be able to load previous versions of the entire object graph as efficiently as the current version. So I want all versions including the current in a single table with the associations based off a separate key from the database primary key. Then I can use filters to restrict the loaded objects for a given session to the current version or the version as of some date.

Thanks in advance.

There is a property-ref attribute you can use. According to the docs,


So you would do something like,



I had a similar problem. Unfortunately I haven't gotten any help :(

http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=964964

Cheers for that, it's almost exactly what I needed. Unfortunately as I can't use bi-directional associations with it as Hibernate complains that there isn't a unique row for the parent reference (justifiably so). And uni-directional associations result in a spurious update to set the parent reference which isn't going to fly for us. Has anyone managed to get around this?

Also there doesn't appear to be an equivalent of the property-ref in Annotations, is anyone aware of a way to do this without having to use the XML mapping file?