@CollectionOfElements, JPA, the documentation and the problems it raises

In a project that I mention a lot there's an persistent model using JPA as an interface to Hibernate.

There was case where I wanted to put extra columns in a @ManyToMany relationship. JPA cannot do that.

So I had to use the Hibernate's @CollectionOfElements.
It works like that: if there are the objects Class and Student, the extra columns go to the wrapper class EnhancedStudent. The EnhancedStudent has a property of type Student.

Now I have a few bugs related to it:

1. Causes the @Version of the containing object (Class) to increment on EntityManager.html#find(java.lang.Class, java.lang.Object)
2. The creation of an ExtraStudent cannot propagate (cascade) the inner Student - no matter what.

The funniest thing is that the documentation of the @CollectionOfElements is a single line:


http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/annotations/api/org/hibernate/annotations/CollectionOfElements.html

:(