[0wen]

I’m trying to retrofit an existing application to hibernate. While code generation is quite neat, and probably great for new applications, I have an existing object hierarchy that I would prefer not to have to retrofit to a new set of objects with slightly different names.

It would be ideal to be able to load an existing class and interactively map it to my database such that I retain control over object properties and what database fields they map to. This would greatly facilitate retrofitting legacy applications to hibernate.

Though hibernate is a great product, as a newbie, I’m finding it a bit confusing to set up the mappings by hand. I realize the mappings are completely logical once you understand them, but I would love some sort of wizard or gui to step through the details for me.

A further example of the need for an interactive tool is that some names in my database are sub-optimal since the database is shared with other applications (e.g. the user table is called “EMPLOYEES” rather than “Users”). With the current hibernate tool, this leads to objects having non-intuitive names [yes, I know this is user error, but a tool would help to manage it].

Is the tool planned to head in this direction? Something like the current wizard for hibernate.cfg.xml would be great. The main problem I find with that tool is that it does not integrate any sort of online help [i.e. it’s nice to be able to add additional properties, but I don’t know what properties are available (this is not a great example b/c the available hibernate properties are quite well laid out in its documentation)].

Not to be a heretic, but are there other hibernate tools out there that work like the above?

[0wen]

Hrm. The hibernate tools appear to have come a long way since I last looked at them several months ago. http://www.hibernate.org/255.html They now seem pretty close to what I was hoping for.

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