I am new with Hibernate so sorry if this is stupid.

Consider this:



In database, Child table has a column parent_id with foreign key to Parent table.

In the Hibernate documentation, I generally find that examples are given when Child class actually has a reference of Parent class. But in my case, I only have the parentId.

So how do I map the parentId field of Child? Will using many-to-one work?

Thanks

P.S. I know i can just try and see but I dont have any developer tools/software. I am just designing a system.

Why wouldn't you do it the normal ORM way - that is: representing the database foreign key with a Java object reference? What you are doing is directly map a foreign key to Java. You then have to manually resolve your "parentId". In ORM this is done by the ORM provider, i.e. Hibernate and the foreign key is normally hidden to the Java world - it is represented as an object reference.

Why should you write code then?
If you need to evaluate your model you should use some tool, I would recommend the hibernate tools (are free and the best); you'll see how your DB schema is mapped to Java entities; as carlolf said you'll not have to bother with ids in your Java code (you can if you want it, but you don't have to), so you bring the model to a more object-oriented way of doing things for your developers.

I would have changed the class if it was in my hands.
But it is not. The client has provided the class definitions and they cannot change :(

I would have changed the class if it was in my hands.
But it is not. The client has provided the class definitions and they cannot change :(