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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T00:06:25+00:00

Ok, say i have a Person entity which needs to have Persons as property

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Ok, say i have a “Person” entity which needs to have “Person”s as property (say, friends)
Since this is a many to many connection, If i’d create this schema using SQL (Which i’m not, i’m using the hbm.ddl.auto to do it for me) i’d probably make another table containing 2 columns with 2 ids (1 for each friend)
However, i’m not sure how to annotate this in hibernate, i did this:

class PersonEntity {

.
.

@ElementCollection
private List<PersonEntity> friends ;

.
.
}

Problem is, i’m not sure it’s the best way.. for instance, i’m “thinking” that whenever i add a friend to the list and persist it will be inserted as the next row in the table, and since i can’t seem to index this field i’m imagining the data retrieval will be inefficient.
Can you suggest better ways to solve this problem?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You’re looking for @ManyToMany and @JoinTable.

    The api doc of ElementCollection says:

    Defines a collection of instances of a basic type or embeddable class

    You have a collection of entity instances. See http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/annotations/reference/en/html_single/#eentity-mapping-association-collection-manytomany for how to use those annotations.

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