HQL order by many to many collection property

Question

I have a hibernate object called `User` which has a many-to-many relationship with another hibernate object called `Post`. The relationship is called `likedPosts` (from the `User` perspective). ```

``` And currently I have a simple HQL query to return the list of liked posts as follows: ``` "select user.likedPosts from User user where user.id=:uid" ``` What I would like is to have this list ordered by a property in the `Post` object (specifically the post id). My (naive) attempt to do this was this: ``` "select user.likedPosts from User user where user.id=:uid order by user.likedPosts.id desc" ``` This doesn't work though - I get an exception telling me I'm not allowed to do this. How would I go about doing this? Thanks! Stack trace for error: ``` org.hibernate.QueryException: illegal attempt to dereference collectio…

Accepted Answer

You need an explicit join to do that:

```
select post from User user
inner join user.likedPosts post
where user.id = :userId
order by post.id desc
```

HQL order by many to many collection property

Solution

Problem