Hi,

I have an Account and Detail tables with one-to-many association.

Table 1:

Name : Account
Columns: account_id
account_name

Table 2:

Name: Detail
Columns : detail_id
detail_name

1) Account is having a SET to maintain Details.Detail will be having a reference to Account.I can get the set of Details from Account object.,from the other side I will be getting account object for every Detail Object.

2)In the Account.hbm.xml files :

<set name="detail" cascade="all" lazy="false">
<key column="account_id" not-null="true"/>
<one-to-many class="Detail"/>
</set>

In the Detail.hbm.xml files.

<many-to-one name="account" column="account_id”
class="account" not-null="true" lazy="false" />


3) According to many articles, here I should go for Bi-directional association and make
<many-to-one> inverse=”true”.I should update on bothsides account.setDetails(<set>Detail) and Detail.setAccount(account)

I am not doing the above, still I am able to satisfy the requirement.

Queries :

1) Can u please explain me the use of birectional association instead of going in my way as two unidirectional (one-to-many and many-to-one) associations.

2) I am not updating the both sides of the association at any time.Can u please tell me what is the requirement to do so?

Thanks
Babu

The answers to your questions are all here:

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/nhibe ... child.html

“inverse” doesn’t make your association bidirectional. As soon as you have an association on both sides it's bidirectional. "inverse" only defines the owning end. If you define a bidirectional association without inverse you may run into troubles when detaching objects from a session and maybe other scenarios.

Hope that helps.