23.2. Author/Work
Consider the following model of the relationships between
Work
, Author
and Person
. In the example, the relationship between Work
and Author
is represented as a many-to-many association and the relationship between Author
and Person
is represented as one-to-one association. Another possibility would be to have Author
extend Person
.

The following mapping document correctly represents these relationships:
<hibernate-mapping> <class name="Work" table="works" discriminator-value="W"> <id name="id" column="id"> <generator class="native"/> </id> <discriminator column="type" type="character"/> <property name="title"/> <set name="authors" table="author_work"> <key column name="work_id"/> <many-to-many class="Author" column name="author_id"/> </set> <subclass name="Book" discriminator-value="B"> <property name="text"/> </subclass> <subclass name="Song" discriminator-value="S"> <property name="tempo"/> <property name="genre"/> </subclass> </class> <class name="Author" table="authors"> <id name="id" column="id"> <!-- The Author must have the same identifier as the Person --> <generator class="assigned"/> </id> <property name="alias"/> <one-to-one name="person" constrained="true"/> <set name="works" table="author_work" inverse="true"> <key column="author_id"/> <many-to-many class="Work" column="work_id"/> </set> </class> <class name="Person" table="persons"> <id name="id" column="id"> <generator class="native"/> </id> <property name="name"/> </class> </hibernate-mapping>
There are four tables in this mapping:
works
, authors
and persons
hold work, author and person data respectively. author_work
is an association table linking authors to works. Here is the table schema, as generated by SchemaExport
:
create table works ( id BIGINT not null generated by default as identity, tempo FLOAT, genre VARCHAR(255), text INTEGER, title VARCHAR(255), type CHAR(1) not null, primary key (id) ) create table author_work ( author_id BIGINT not null, work_id BIGINT not null, primary key (work_id, author_id) ) create table authors ( id BIGINT not null generated by default as identity, alias VARCHAR(255), primary key (id) ) create table persons ( id BIGINT not null generated by default as identity, name VARCHAR(255), primary key (id) ) alter table authors add constraint authorsFK0 foreign key (id) references persons alter table author_work add constraint author_workFK0 foreign key (author_id) references authors alter table author_work add constraint author_workFK1 foreign key (work_id) references works