What is the association path in hibernate?

Question

Consider createAlias method. The docs says: associationPath - A dot-seperated property path. I do not understand what it is? Say that there are 2 tables - Customer (id, name) and Ortder (id, customer_id). Supose that Criteria is created for Customer entity - what association path should be?

1. "Customer.id = Order.customer_id"
2. or just "Order" as I saw at some forums?

Could somebody provide several examples for several situations, like left join, inner join and of course join with clause?

Answer 1

Suppose there are 2 Entities (not tables) Customer and Order mapped to the mentioned tables. Class Order has @ManyToOne reference to Customer. You try to search Orders and want to get all orders of a customer with name "Customer1".

Criteria cr=sessioncreateCriteria(Order.class)
        .createAlias("customer", "c", JoinType.INNER_JOIN);

Thus you use "customer" field name of Order entity class and make it alias with name "c".

Then you can add your condition for the alias "c"

cr.add(Restrictions.eq("c.name", customerNameParameter);