hello every one...
i have used hibernate in some projects before and when i want to map a bidirectional one-to-many association i use a set and a foreign key, cascading (all-delete orphan) and inverse=true. I have read somewhere ( "Beginning hibernate, From novice to professional", Apress, p.87-88 ) , that i can use a link table to maintain a one-to-many association . the parent and child tables will have both foreign keys which will be the PK of the link table. also i must use a unique constraint on one of the sides (or else it would be a many to many )... i have never used that before. my question is, which is more efficient in terms of database crud functions and maintenance and why? thank you in advance.

The only reason I would introduce the extra complexity of a join table for a one-to-many is if the items in the many side were not aware of the items on the one side. I've used this pattern for things like addresses where an Address can be referred to from e.g. an Order as well as an Account. In that situation, you would not want to have mulitple FK's back to order and account tables. Instead, use a join table (well documented in the Hibernate manual) per association and the address table can be reused.

Make sense?

-Chris

that makes sense a lot , thanx...