[hibernate-dev] embed-xml=false leaves you stuck

[Steve Ebersole]

On Dec 11, 2007, at 8:02 PM, Bill Burke wrote:

> I was looking at the XML mapping support for Hibernate recently and  
> have some questions/suggestions.
>
> One thing that seriously annoyed me was that if you do not have  
> embed-xml="true" you can never get access to an association/ 
> relationship in XML format.  This means that I cannot have embed- 
> xml="false" and load the relationship with a fetch join.  Is there  
> any particular reason I'm missing here on why it was implemented in  
> this fashion?
Consistency.  Partially it has to do with avoiding circular references  
as you mention below, but that is really a choice for the person doing  
the mapping (hence why embed-xml is even an *option*).  The bigger  
issue here imo is the fact that the nature of XML suggests that we are  
discussing structured data; structure which is generally described by  
a schema or DTD.  What you do not like is the "static" nature of the  
choice...

I am not "an XML person".  However, I believe there is an approach  
which would be great and which XML supports, but I am not certain.  I  
am talking about representing the association as a  
"link" (potentially) to another part of the document describing the  
associated data on the basis that it may be shared:
<person id="1">
     <name>Bill Burke</name>
     <!- here, an 'employer' element would "link" to the <company  
id="1"/> reference below -->
</person>

<company id="1">
     ...
</company>

Then, if the association data is uninitialized you would still have  
the "link", but the entity data would not be included in the document.

I think that would be a great feature/option and would gladly accept  
patches for that.