Maps a to-many cardinality association taking values over several entity types which are not related by the usual entity inheritance, using a discriminator value stored in an association table.

The annotated property should be of type java.util.List, java.util.Set, java.util.Collection, or java.util.Map, and the elements of the collection must be entities.

For example:

@ManyToAny
@Column(name = "property_type")
@AnyKeyJavaClass(Long.class)
@AnyDiscriminatorValue(discriminator = "S", entity = StringProperty.class)
@AnyDiscriminatorValue(discriminator = "I", entity = IntegerProperty.class)
@JoinTable(name = "repository_properties",
           joinColumns = @JoinColumn(name = "repository_id"),
           inverseJoinColumns = @JoinColumn(name = "property_id"))
@Cascade(PERSIST)
private List<Property<?>> properties = new ArrayList<>();

In this example, Property is not required to be an entity type, it might even just be an interface, but its subtypes StringProperty and IntegerProperty must be entity classes with the same identifier type.

This is just the many-valued form of Any, and the mapping options are similar, except that the @JoinTable annotation is used to specify the association table.

• AnyDiscriminator, JdbcType, or JdbcTypeCode specifies the type of the discriminator,
• AnyDiscriminatorValue specifies how discriminator values map to entity types.
• AnyKeyJavaType, AnyKeyJavaClass, AnyKeyJdbcType, or AnyKeyJdbcTypeCode specifies the type of the foreign key.
• jakarta.persistence.JoinTable specifies the name of the association table and its foreign key columns.
• jakarta.persistence.Column specifies the column of the association table in which the discriminator value is stored.