For example, i have a list of X inside Y. X has 5 items, and i insert then in a specific order. Then i save them to Hibernate.

Now i want to recover X from Y, but i have no explicit column to order by and I want to retrieve the collection in the same order i had first inserted (before saving it to the database).

Is it possible? Or i must explicitly order by something?

I can`t order by id, because the items of X already existed in the database, i just want the collection to be in a certain order!

Thanks in advance,
Chicoscience

This may not be optimal solution, but as a workaround you could use a Map to store your objects by insertion order.

int index = 0;
Map map = new HashMap();

map.put(Integer.valueOf(index), Object o1);
index++;
map.put(Integer.valueOf(index), Object o2);
index++;
etc...

When you need the list of values, you can do map.values()
When you need the insertion order, you can do map.keySet() to get the Integers for each insertion and a map.get(...) for each value.

If someone else has a better suggestion, go with it. That's just my stab at it.

Thanks a lote, your solution worked, but after that i found an even better solution:

To use @indexColumn for the relation between the entities!

But thanks again!

Use <list> mapping element instead of set and you'll get ordered list of entities.