Hibernate: How do I map a one-to-many list with String key and no FK

You can have Hibernate instantiate the relationship for you, or you can instantiate it yourself. It is tempting to do it all in hibernate, but I have found, in my experience, that there are times you have different use cases for loading the same domain object, and in some cases, if don't want dependents loaded, it could hurt performance. I usually manually load child collections and leave Hibernate out of it.

Anyway, to do it with Hibernate, you need to add the bean property to the Parent class:

List<Child> children; // also getters/setters

Then create your parent.hbm.xml as below:

Also create a child.hbm.xml, but if you use inverse="false" you don't have to add anything to the child. If you do want the child to refer back, then you need to declare a relationship in the child hbm file, something like below, but not necessarily with the same otions.

Inside child.hbm.xml

      <many-to-one name="parent" column="PARENT_ROW_ID" class="com.foo.domain.Parent" insert="false" update="false" lazy="false" />

And your Child bean must have "parent" as an exposed bean property. Likewise, Parent needs children as a bean property.

<!-- parent.hbm.xml -->
<hibernate-mapping>
	<class name="com.foo.domain.Parent" table="PARENT">
		<id name="id" column="ROW_ID">
			<generator class="assigned"/>
		</id>
 
		<property name="col1" column="COL1"/>
		<property name="col2" column="COL2"/>
 
		<!-- Associations -->
		<set name="children" inverse="false">
			<key column="PARENT_ROW_ID"/>
			<one-to-many class="com.foo.domain.Child"/>
		</set>       
	</class>
</hibernate-mapping>

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Thanks mrjoltcola. I totally understand what you mean by not loading the dependents in some cases.

OK. So if I decided not to load the association by hibernate. What is the best way of doing it?

public Collection<Parent> getAllParents(){ ... } this one is easy, just use parent mapping and won;t load dependent

//load dependents
public Parent getParentsById(String key){ ... }
use 1 parent mapping and 1 child mapping and not associated, right? so what is the best approach of doing this? HQL? criteria?

And by the way, the child doesn't have a PK. How can I map the id field?

It is a view, so I guess I can't really do anything on the DB side. But I guess I will just use spring Jdbc template. for the child.

Thanks!

Which is a view? The child? Tell your DBA to fix the schema! :)

Good luck.