Creating a many-to-many relation between an entity and an another many-to-many relation with (N)Hibernate

Question

I'm trying to create a many-to-many association between an entity and another many-to-many association. How can that be done?

I followed the Customer/Order/Product example to attach custom properties to a many-to-many association between two of my entities (Categories and Tags). That worked like a charm.

The problem is that now I need another entity (Supplier) to have many-to-many relation with Category-Tag-Relation, which was implemented as a composite-element according to that example.

But as far as I can see composite-element cannot participate in a many-to-many relationships :(.

The whole idea of what am I trying to achieve is depicted below:

Answer 1

You should map CategoryTagRelation as an entity. That will solve your issue completely.