Thanks for the reply, Fabio. I have already advised them to consider a surrogate key, but it is a legacy database that I do not have any control over.
The problem I can see with <properties>, is that as per the Hibernate documentation<http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/core/3.3/reference/en/html/mapping.html#mapping-declaration-properties> : The <properties> element allows the definition of a named, logical grouping of the properties of a class. The most important use of the construct is that it allows a combination of properties to be the target of a property-ref. It is also a convenient way to define a multi-column unique constraint. Unfortunately, this is an overloaded feature, meaning the creation of the <properties> group is also used to *define* the mapped properties. That is, they cannot be used in more than one grouping. I read it as “if property *x * is defined in set A, it cannot be defined in set B” Cheers, Stuart -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nhusers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nhusers?hl=en.
