7.3. Polymorphic associations
Polymorphism is a defining feature of object-oriented languages like Java. Support for polymorphic associations and polymorphic queries is an absolutely basic feature of an ORM solution like Hibernate. Surprisingly, we've managed to get this far without needing to talk much about polymorphism. Even more surprisingly, there is not much to say on the topic—polymorphism is so easy to use in Hibernate that we don't need to spend a lot of effort explaining it.
To get an overview, we first consider a many-to-one association to a class that may have subclasses. In this case, Hibernate guarantees that you can create links to any subclass instance just like you would to instances of the superclass.
7.3.1. Polymorphic many-to-one ...
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