Bag vs. List

public class FilterGroup {
    private List<Fitler> filters = new ArrayList<Fitler>();
    ...
}

I mapped List as above but got bizarre result. Although there are only 8 items in the list, it returned a list with over 1000 item and most of them are null. It turns out this is because the column "orderPos" used for list index contains a big number 1025+.

I do want a sorted list. So I change to use bag mapping with order-by. It works well. In Hibernate document, it said bag is mapped for Collection. Internally it is implemented as ArrayList but ignores index (Bag is different from set in that it allows duplicates). So I can map it to List as well and add a order-by to sort it in database level. (set, map, bag all can have order-by)

Also, note that we need "delete-orphan" cascade for collection. So when we do a update on FilterGroup, the filters removed from the collection will be deleted from database automatically. Otherwise, it will still remain.