In my application I use JPA 2.0 with Hibernate as the persistence provider. I have a one-to-many relationship between two entities (using a @JoinColumn and not @JoinTable). I wanted to know how could I specify inverse=true (as specified in hbm.xml) in JPA annotations to reverse the relationship owner.

Thank you.


I found an answer to this. The mappedBy attribute of @OneToMany annotation behaves the same as inverse = true in the xml file.


The attribute mappedBy indicates that the entity in this side is the inverse of the relationship, and the owner resides in the other entity. Other entity will be having @JoinColumn annotaion and @ManyToOne relationship. Hence I think inverse = true is same as @ManyToOne annotation.

Also inverse=”true” mean this is the relationship owner to handle the relationship.