Hibernate versioning and natural ids

Hey there,
just noticed that in the hibernate mapping you can't include a version into a natural id? Any idea why? It seems to me that a name together with a version number form a good natural id.

Hey there,
just noticed that in the hibernate mapping you can't include a version into a natural id? Any idea why? It seems to me that a name together with a version number form a good natural id.

A natural ID would would be supported by the "assigned" id generation strategy which will support whatever you like. What makes you think you can't include a version?

Originally posted by Paul Sturrock:
What makes you think you can't include a version?

well, according to the DTD you can't place a version element in the natural id element:

The version element is for Hibernate's optimistic locking strategy, so you can't use that element. Because of that it only has meaning when you update an entity. If you create a primary key that includes a version column this means you can effectively never update your entities. If you change an row's identifier you are strictly deleting the row and creating a new one. And Hibernate is strict in its application of RDBMS principles.

But you could write your own verioning implementation that does this work for you.

Ah, got it! I was confuse about the version element.