Hibernate: Parent/Child relationship in a single-table

Question

I hardly see any pointer on the following problem related to Hibernate. This pertains to implementing inheritance using a single database table with a parent-child relationship

Answer 1

Thanks a ton guys. I created my Employee Entity as follows:

@Entity
@Inheritance(strategy = InheritanceType.SINGLE_TABLE)
@DiscriminatorColumn(
    name="EMPLOYEE_TYPE", 
    discriminatorType = DiscriminatorType.STRING
)
@DiscriminatorValue("Employee")
public abstract class Employee {

    @Id 
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    @Column(name="EMPLOYEE_ID") 
    private Integer empId = null;

    @Column(name="EMPLOYEE_NAME") 
    private String empName = null;

    @Column(name="EMPLOYEE_SECRETARY")
    private String secretary;

    @Column(name="EMPLOYEE_PERKS")
    private int perks;       

    @ManyToOne(targetEntity = Employee.class, optional=true)
@JoinColumn(name="MANAGER_ID", nullable=true)
private Employee manager = null;

    @OneToMany  
    private Set reportees = new HashSet();

    ...        

    public Set getReportees() {
        return reportees;
    } 
}

I then added other Entity classes with no body but just Discriminator columns values, such as Manager, CEO and AsstManager. I chose to let Hibernate create the table for me. Following is the main program:

SessionFactory sessionFactory = HibernateUtil.sessionFactory;
Session session = sessionFactory.openSession();
Transaction newTrans = session.beginTransaction();

CEO empCeo = new CEO();
empCeo.setEmpName("Mr CEO");
empCeo.setSecretary("Ms Lily");

Manager empMgr = new Manager();
empMgr.setEmpName("Mr Manager1");
empMgr.setPerks(1000);
empMgr.setManager(empCeo);

Manager empMgr1 = new Manager();
empMgr1.setEmpName("Mr Manager2");
empMgr1.setPerks(2000);
empMgr1.setManager(empCeo);

AsstManager asstMgr = new AsstManager();
asstMgr.setEmpName("Mr Asst Manager");
asstMgr.setManager(empMgr);

session.save(empCeo);
session.save(empMgr);
session.save(empMgr1);
session.save(asstMgr);
newTrans.commit();

System.out.println("Mr Manager1's manager is : "
        + empMgr.getManager().getEmpName());
System.out.println("CEO's manager is : " + empCeo.getManager());
System.out.println("Asst Manager's manager is : " + asstMgr.getManager());
System.out.println("Persons Reporting to CEO: " + empCeo.getReportees());

session.clear();
session.close();

The code runs fine, Hibernate was creating a column "MANAGER_EMPLOYEE_ID" on its own where it stores the FK. I specified the JoinColumn name to make it "MANAGER_ID". Hibernate also creates a table EMPLOYEE_EMPLOYED, however the data is not being persisted there.

Method getReportees() method returns a null, while getManager() works fine, as expected.