I have already seen a mapping example of recursive relationship that uses a foreign key on the same table. As for my case, the recursive relationship is using a cross-reference table to resolve many-to-may relationship. The following should illustrate the DB structure.



Basically, a part has a list of substitute parts. Conversely, a part can also be a substitute of several primary parts.

From a class perspective, I would assume that they can just use the same class named Part. Only that if it's a primary part, it will have a list of substitute parts and if it's a substitute part, it will have a linkage to its primary parts.

My question is:

How can I map the substitute parts in the Part class so that it uses the same class as part? Is this possible in the first place? Take note that the primary part would have to query the PART_SUBSTITUTE_XREF table first and get the substitute part numbers before querying back to the PART table and use those part numbers to get the details of the substitute parts.

The following SQL statement should illustrate what I want to happen.

It should work with a mapping like following, mapping defining a bidirectional many-to-many relation.
In this way hibernate automatically maps the relations through a join table (aka cross-table).



If you need that the cross-table is named exactly 'PART_SUBSTITUTE_XREF',
then you can additionally use the @SecondaryTable(name="PART_SUBSTITUTE_XREF") annotation.