We have several standalone systems using Hibernate that load a few classes/mappings. I have been adding classes to the mapping dynamically by doing something like this:



This works very well -- except when you have open sessions. Any open sessions now have a stale copy of the session factory. Is there some sanctioned way to rebuild the session factory with the new configuration information? If there isn't does it make sense support rebuilding an existing sessionFactory? something like .

If you mean previous opened session (with the old sessionFactory) keep staled meta model.
Then there is no way to associate old sessions with the new one. It would certainly break session cache and lot's of stuff.

And it does break lots of stuff. What I wonder is if it would work to rebuild/append to the internal maps in an existing session factory. All existing meta information would remain the same just adding new meta information. Looking at the code it seems that it shouldn't break anything. I didn't look at the cache but that could be flushed in this case and seems to be existing/tested functionality.

No way. This would break a million things. What are you worrying about old sessions for anyway? Sessions are meant to be short-lived things!

I was trying to add classes just-in-time. For an application I am working on I have three choices - configure just-in-time, configure all needed components and build a new factory each time, or create the application as a daemon. Originally, I went with the just-in-tim option but now I am configuring all necessary components and building a new factory.

In this case I was stepping through the SessionFactoryImpl in debug and don't see where adding to the meta data maps would break anything -- but I'll take your word for it since you wrote the code.