[Hibernate-devel] Bidirectional associations

[Gavin_King/Cirrus%<CI...@ci...>]

As per Paul's request, there are now bidirectional associations in the
version in CVS. I havn't implemented validation of the associations yet,
but I really feel like thats an important feature.

Bidirectional associations must be either:

Set on one end, single valued the other end OR
Set on both ends.

The semantics of something more complicated than that (eg. Map one end,
array the other are just a bit too questionable.)

How it works is you manually map a many-to-one and a nested one-to-many to
the same table column, or two nested many-to-manys to the same association
table. You mark one end of the association with the "mirror" attribute (an
attribute of the "set" element). The end marked as mirror is just a view of
the association. Changes made at that end are _not_ persistent.

Does anyone know a better name for that attribute?

In other news: (1) The latest version in CVS squashes a bunch of bugs that
tests were missing. (2) I've almost finished the XML generation
functionality for people to have a look at. I'm probably _not_ going to
implement XML to objects right now since there is already enough work
supporting the existing functionality to keep me plenty busy for a while.

I will release a new version as soon as I've finished writing some new
tests and removing a hardcoded path from the XML generation stuff. Would
people please try out the version in CVS with their code and see if any new
bugs exist.