All,

The application is question is a "Learning Management System. I have a need to do a Many to Many recursive mapping. I have a table called Person. This stores all of the information relating to any of the different types of Person in the system. Persons can play the role of "user", "agent", "administrator" and a few others. This is no problem. The recursive issue comes in when I have "student". The student has all the same details as the "user", but a "student" has to be associated to a "user". I was thinking of creating a "Student" table that would hold the primary key for the parent ("user") and the primary key for the "student". Both of the keys would originate within the Person table.

Person => Student <= Person
personId - parentId
studentId - PersonId

I only have the Person.hbm.xml and I have not seen anything in the hibernate documentation that describes this situation. If you know where there is documentation or if you have solved this issue, I would be most grateful for any assistance.

As each student has to be associated to one "user" (and not to more than one),
this sounds more like being a ManyToOne relation than a ManyToMany.