Hibernate THIS!

Yesterday I spent ALL DAY trying to track down a Hibernate mapping error. On the most part, solving my problem felt like a guessing game, because I could never find the information I needed to suit my particular situation - and you'd think that my particular situation was a relatively common one. I have an association table with 3 fields, two of which are the primary key and are foreign keys to other tables. Pretty common...but try finding any documentation on this sort of crap. No siree...no luck. I spent all day scavenging Google in search of a solution to my problem and was able to piece together a solution based on snippets I found here and there. And yes, they were snippets...because the people who post solutions these problems on various help sites don't bother to post the full solution. For example, they'll post a snippet of the Hibernate mapping file, so I have NO IDEA what object this snippet belongs to. Or they'll post the full mapping file, but don't post the Java code that goes along with it. Arrrrrrrrrgh!!!

At any rate, I found a solution, thanks to a co-worker who happened to be Hibernate-savvy. And no, I'm not telling you how I solved it. I just get to complain...maybe when I feel less annoyed, I'll do a FULL SOLUTION, not a crappy snippet of a solution. ;-)