[hibernate-dev] Natural ids and inheritance

Another discrepancy between hbm.xml and annotations currently is the definition of natural ids. hbm.xml only allows natural ids to be defined on the root entity, annotations allow it to be defined on any level of the hierarchy, even across classes. We need to decide what we want to support. 2 things to consider here are: 1) whether we limit @NaturalId to only root entity meta (and maybe @MappedSuperclass for root entities) 2) if we do not limit, what @NaturalId spread across a hierarchy "means" In the second point, consider: class A @NaturalId key1 class AA extends A @NaturalId key2 Personally I vote for limiting @NaturalId to the root entity. This allows caching to work just like it does for identifiers. -- steve(a)hibernate.org http://hibernate.org