On 18 Dec (20:49), Gavin King wrote: > So: Do people USE this feature?? Have people really actually found uses > for this stuff, or is it actually just making Hibernate harder to > understand > for the first time? Even if it has been useful, is perhaps *still* > undesirable, > because of concerns about data integrity? Perhaps we simply shouldn't > be encouraging this kind of relational model.....
I tried once to use toplevel collections, because I had a "collection of collections" and the collection could be referenced by two different classes. The mapping wasn't hard to understand, but the restrictions on the load/delete/update killed them for me. Using a Hibernate Session is straightforward if you don't use toplevel collections, the only thing to keep in mind is handling bidirectional associations with setparent/setchild on both ends. Toplevel collections add a lot more overhead to this handling routines, which is what kept me from using it. As soon as I realized that, I stopped even thinking about using a toplevel collection and change my models accordingly. I bet a lot of people are doing the same, the benefits of toplevel collections would be nice, but dealing with them is not. My point is: For every aspect thats on your "plus" side for toplevel collections, find a different way of implementing it without a toplevel collection, then compare the effort for both methods and decide wether this justifies an additional idiom (tl collections) in Hibernate or not. Data Integrity: I'm not a DB newbie, so I noticed the missing foreign key on first sight. But this is just the implementation of toplevel collections, which could be changed if the idiom itself is worth it. -- Christian Bauer [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by: With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility Learn to use your power at OSDN's High Performance Computing Channel http://hpc.devchannel.org/ _______________________________________________ hibernate-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hibernate-devel
