Marina, you are a star. I was expecting the inheritance of annotations to happen at the most fine grained level whereas if an entity is defined in orm.xml, this definition actually replaces all annotations for that entity.
So in my case, I was expecting the annotation for the joined column to be as per the annotation but actually, since I hadn't specified it, it was being left out.
On closer examination of the JPA spec (
http://www.nabble.com/Sematics-of-the-orm.xml-file-t1799022.html) this is what is supposed to happen, although as Chris originally said, the tightening up in JPA compliance between Toplink releases has meant that my code no longer complies because of this.
Many thanks for the help. Actually I was only going down this road because Oracle Developer provides some but by no means all the standard annotations I need (specifically value generation for ids, extra named queries, cascades). You don't by chance know of a database schema tool which can generate java classes with ALL annotations and not just the few that Oracle have decided are ok ?
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