[hibernate-dev] Embedded Composite Identifiers

I am thinking we should start to soft-deprecate[1] the historical feature of embedded composite identifiers. This is the feature that allowed an entity to define a composite identifier without any kind of "pk class" (EmbeddedId/IdClass): @Entity public class MyEntity { @Id public Integer key1; @Id public Integer key2; ... } The you'd always have to instantiate the entity to deal with its identifier. For example, to load such an entity: MyEntity id = new MyEntity(1,2); MyEntity it = session.get( MyEntity.class, id ); Between EmbeddedId and IdClass there are better alternatives to document. Thoughts? [1] - By "soft-deprecate" I mean remove discussion of it from the documentation, and don't really push it.