Why doesnt the following work

versions
hibernate-annotations-3.4.0.GA
hibernate-distribution-3.3.2.GA
hibernate-entitymanager-3.4.0.GA
hibernate-validator-4.0.1.GA

mysql-5.1.41-linux-i686-glibc23

I have entities as follows: Person, Gender, Title

Person has gender_id and title_id as foreign keys, with foreign indexes set up to gender and title tables

The only way i can insert a Person row is to populate persons Gender and Title attributes with rows read
from the Gender and Title tables.

If I instantiate Gender and Title objects and assign these to person, the save fails with

org.hibernate.PropertyValueException: not-null property references a null or transient value: com.pre.school.dao.Person.gender

That is what a foreign key means. The person must reference a gender and title that is present in the database (unless null values are allowed). But, assuming that you also want to create new entries in the Gender and Title tables, there are two ways to go:

1. Save the new Gender and Title objects in your own code.
2. Setup cascading so that Hibernate automatically saves them to the database. Eg. map your @ManyToOne:s with cascade=CascadeType.PERSIST. See http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/ ... ml#d0e1177 for some examples.

Thanks for looking at this...

However what I am trying to do is use the gender and title as read only reference tables (So I do not want to insert new rows , or indeed delete rows from them when i delete an owning person row)

I just want to have a many link from all my Person(s) to each one Gender and or Title row.

I think the problem is that the gender and title entities are not associated with the hibernate session

Use Session.load() to get the Gender and Title instances. This will not hit the database unless you have disabled proxies. Then use those instances in the many-to-one associations on the new Person.