Hi,
I discovered the keywords "null" and "not null" for the @DiscriminatorValue annotation value and it seems to match my need. (To have a default Entity class in my inheritance strategy.
However, before considering using this feature in my application and deploy it in production environment, I would like to find some documentation about it.
I don't want to use a "hidden feature" which could be removed in a newer version.

Is there some (official?) documentation on this feature?
The only reference I found was:

(from https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/4. ... tion-class)

Sorry for my poor english...

This class is defined by JPA so it is supported and it will not be removed. The JPA spec and the Javadocs are also authoritative resources.

You can use the @DiscriminatorValu to distinguish between subclasses that belong to the same inheritance tree. If the value is null, then Hibernate will use an implicit naming strategy. If you provide a non-null value explicitly, Hibernate is going to use that value for identifying the subtype.

I consider using the "not null" String value, not a not-null value.

"null" and "not null" seem to be reserved values.

If I have the following entities:


Then if value is "DOG", as expected, Hibernate returns a DogEntity.
But if value is "CAT", "BIRD" or anything other than "DOG", Hibernate returns a DefaultAnimalEntity.
That is the behavior I want, but I found nothing in any documentation, except the line I quoted in the first message.

I found these two values hard-coded in Hibernate PersistentClass source http://grepcode.com/file/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org.hibernate/hibernate-core/4.2.0.Final/org/hibernate/mapping/PersistentClass.java/#55.
They are then used here: http://grepcode.com/file/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org.hibernate/hibernate-core/4.2.0.Final/org/hibernate/mapping/PersistentClass.java/#493
But I don't know if it is a standard behavior and if I can rely on it.

I'm going to ask on the mailing list to see if this is official and we need to document it.

I have just documented the NULL and NOT NULL options. I also wrote a blog post about it.

However, there are other options as well.

You can use @DiscriminatorOptions as documented in the User Guide.

Great!

Thanks a lot!