Red Hat Summit Red Hat SummitSupportConsoleDevelopersStart a trialContact

7.6. More complex association mappings

More complex association joins are extremely rare. Hibernate handles more complex situations by using SQL fragments embedded in the mapping document. For example, if a table with historical account information data defines accountNumber, effectiveEndDate and effectiveStartDatecolumns, it would be mapped as follows: 
<properties name="currentAccountKey">
    <property name="accountNumber" type="string" not-null="true"/>
    <property name="currentAccount" type="boolean">
        <formula>case when effectiveEndDate is null then 1 else 0 end</formula>
    </property>
</properties>
<property name="effectiveEndDate" type="date"/>
<property name="effectiveStateDate" type="date" not-null="true"/>
Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap
You can then map an association to the current instance, the one with null effectiveEndDate, by using: 
<many-to-one name="currentAccountInfo" 
        property-ref="currentAccountKey"
        class="AccountInfo">
    <column name="accountNumber"/>
    <formula>'1'</formula>
</many-to-one>
Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap
In a more complex example, imagine that the association between Employee and Organization is maintained in an Employment table full of historical employment data. An association to the employee's most recent employer, the one with the most recent startDate, could be mapped in the following way: 
<join>
    <key column="employeeId"/>
    <subselect>
        select employeeId, orgId 
        from Employments 
        group by orgId 
        having startDate = max(startDate)
    </subselect>
    <many-to-one name="mostRecentEmployer" 
            class="Organization" 
            column="orgId"/>
</join>
Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap
This functionality allows a degree of creativity and flexibility, but it is more practical to handle these kinds of cases using HQL or a criteria query.
Back to top
Red Hat logoGithubredditYoutubeTwitter

Learn

Try, buy, & sell

Communities

About Red Hat Documentation

We help Red Hat users innovate and achieve their goals with our products and services with content they can trust. Explore our recent updates.

Making open source more inclusive

Red Hat is committed to replacing problematic language in our code, documentation, and web properties. For more details, see the Red Hat Blog.

About Red Hat

We deliver hardened solutions that make it easier for enterprises to work across platforms and environments, from the core datacenter to the network edge.

Theme

© 2025 Red Hat