Persist elements of 2 different collections in the same tabl

bertrand · **Posted:** Mon Dec 11, 2006 11:45 am

(using Hibernate 3.x)

Person and Building have multiple Addresses.
Person and Building are persisted in their own table. They do not share anything in common (separate class hierarchies).
I'd like to persist the Addresses in a single table, whether they are attached to a Person or a Building.

Code:

public class Person {
   ...
  Collection<Address> addresses;
   ...
}

public class Building {
   ...
  Collection<Address> addresses;
   ...
}

In addition, the Address's lifecycle is bounded to the one of its owner, ie. Person's addresses should be deleted when the Person is deleted.
In other words, Addresses are not shared between different entities.

I have tried many different mapping strategies with no (real) success... Hibernate offers so many options since the 3.x series - I'm getting lost.
Can someone please help me on this subject ?

Thx

/bertrand

lester · **Posted:** Mon Dec 11, 2006 11:53 am

What about table-per-class-hierarchy for Addresses? For example, you can create abstract class Address with two subclasses, PersonAddress and BuildingAddress, each mapped to the same table with some discriminator value.

bertrand · **Posted:** Mon Dec 11, 2006 11:59 am

lester wrote:

What about table-per-class-hierarchy for Addresses? For example, you can create abstract class Address with two subclasses, PersonAddress and BuildingAddress, each mapped to the same table with some discriminator value.

I understand your proposition, unfortunately, for many different reasons, we don't want to specialize the Address class only to be able to persist it... Besides this mapping problem, nothing else would differentiate a BuildingAddress from a PersonAddress.

I'd like somehow to consider this semantic has being part of the link Person-Address or Building-Address, not within Address itself.

See what I mean ?