Please look at the following example.

class abstract Device

class Computer extends Device
class MobilePhone extends Device

Device has a few fields common to all Devices, say price and owner. I like to use a table-per-concrete-class mapping and I wish to have all information about price and owner in one *.hbm.xml file. But as far as I understood the documentation there would be no file Device.hbm.xml. I have to put the same information in Computer.hbm.xml and MobilePhone.hbm.xml.

How can I avoid this redundancy?

best regards
Jan

Use xdoclet.
There is no way do do that in hbm.xml

Thank you for your answer. I will read the xDoclet documentation. This will be a solution for my problem.

But having something which I can express using xDoclet but not using your *.hbm.xml files is a little bit confusing for me. Would it not be good giving the same power to xDoclet and *.hbm.xml? If there would be an additional *.hbm.xml file for the root class containing all the properties in common to all subclasses Hibernate would have all information needed to make the mapping using Java reflection. And there would be no redundancy in the *.hbm.xml files of the subclasses. May be this could be a feature in a future release? What do you think about this proposal?

Best regards Jan

xdoclet generate hbm, so it can duplicate info when needed.

Sorry if my point of view was not quite clear in my last posting. I knew that xcoclet generates hbm. I think even if I write the hbm files per hand without using xdoclet it should be possible to do this without code duplication.

Best regards Jan