Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook

4.4. Using Bidirectional Associations

In our creation code, we established links from tracks to artists, simply by adding Java objects to appropriate collections. Hibernate did the work of translating these associations and groupings into the necessary cryptic entries in a join table it created for that purpose. It allowed us with easy, readable code to establish and probe these relationships. But remember that we made this association bidirectional—the Artist class has a collection of Track associations too. We didn't bother to store anything in there.

The great news is that we don't have to. Because of the fact that we marked this as an inverse mapping in the Artist mapping document, Hibernate understands that when we add an Artist association to a Track, we're implicitly adding that Track as an association to the Artist at the same time.

Warning:

This convenience works only when you make changes to the "primary" mapping, in which case they propagate to the inverse mapping. If you make changes only to the inverse mapping, in our case the Set of tracks in the Artist object, they will not be persisted. This unfortunately means your code must be sensitive to which mapping is the inverse.

Let's build a simple interactive graphical application that can help us check whether the artist to track links really show up. It will let you type in an artist's name, and show you all the tracks associated with that artist. A lot of the code is very similar to our first query test. Create the file ...