Hi,

I am having difficulty performing updates on some persisted objects. In my situation, I have an abstract class(call it "Animal") which is extended by three concrete classes(call them "Cat", "Dog", and "Horse"). Niether Cat, Dog, nor Horse contain any fields of their own; the only thing that differs between them and Animal is the functionality of their methods. The hbm file for Animal looks something like this:



I would like to be able to load a Cat object, modify some of its fields, and then update it such that it gets persisted as a Dog object(ie, change the discriminator value). When I load the Cat object; copy all of its fields into a new dog object; modify some of those fields; and then update the database with this Dog object, the fields get correctly modified but the object is still stored as a Cat. In other words, Hibernate has refused to touch the discriminator-value of an object upon updating it.

So my question is: is it possible to modify a persisted object's class type and then update it, and have this change be reflected in the discriminator column?

Thank you,
Chris

I hate to be a nuissance, but if anyone could give me a simple 'yes' or 'no' answer as to whether this is possible it would be greatly appreciated.

I have the same need, and the answer is NO, unfortunately...

one work around is to have your Animal class mapped to the table without using the discriminator ( i.e. reads all from table ) and then you can read a dog row and change it to cat, all via the Animal class.

once the updat is done, you should be able to read that row back as Cat, which will have its own ( duplicate ) mapping file to the same table, with a discriminator based on its type.

Hope that helps.

This isn't correct, it's possible. I just succeeded in doing this. Don't mind the Spring stuff. The real trick is the evict();