I am looking to plugin a framework, Meta-JB (http://sourceforge.net/projects/meta-jb) into the Hibernate. Instead of returning concrete objects from a query, I would like to be able to wrap the invidual rows as metaObjects (basically Map-like name/value pairs). I was wondering if the Hibernate API has some interfaces that can be implemented to hook in as we need to. Is there any documentation about extending/hooking into the Hibernate framework?

Since our applications tend not to use concrete model objects, but rather metaObjects, we currently have to create the model objects just for Hibernate to use and then wrap them as metaObjects for use in the rest of the application.


Meta-JB description for background....

Meta-JB extends the Java Beans concept providing more generic access to object attributes and descriptions. The descriptions of a class's properties (the MetaClass) and access to an object's attributes are decoupled from actual implementations by adapters implementing a Map-like name/value interface (the MetaObject). Because the thin framework is built on generic interfaces, it is not tied directly to real Java bean implementations and can also be used for anything that can access values by name. (Some examples might be SQL result sets, HTTP request data, or simple hash maps.) Once a "class" has been described, the information can even be applied to different underlying implementations.

try to look into PropertyAccessor which allow you to change the way hibernate read and write properties to an object.

and look at Interceptor.instantiate