How to persist a recursive property in Hibernate?

Question

I am struggling with a Hibernate mapping involving a class with a property of the same class type. Ie (simplified):

public class A {
    protected A next = null;
}

My mapping currently looks like:

<hibernate-mapping package="mypackage">
    <class name="A" table="tblA" lazy="false">

        <id name="id">
            <generator class="native"/>
        </id>

        <property name="next" type="A" />

    </class>
</hibernate-mapping>

However during Hibernate initialization I get a Exception in thread "main" org.hibernate.MappingException: Could not determine type for: A, at table: tblA, for columns: [org.hibernate.mapping.Column(next)] .

My understanding is that I am trying to use a mapping which hasn't been declared yet (because I am doing it right now) and I would probably need something like a forward declaration, or so. Do you have any idea?

Thank you
Tunnuz

Answer 1

It is a reference:

<many-to-one name="next"/>

<Property> is used for primitive types. There is usually no need to declare the type, since it is determined by Hibernate using reflection.