I'm modifying a web application and in the configuration files you can specify
attribute names which are supposed to relate to the attributes of a table in my MySQL database
but I want to account for the case where an attribute is specified in the configuration
which doesn't map to an attribute of the database and then give them an error like
"specified attribute in configuration does not correspond to any attribute in the database table"

So using hibernate how does one check for column existence?

thanks