hi,

is it possible to use the hibernate.cfg.xml together with hibernate.properties?

the data model we have created is generic and should be used by other projects in my company, so we plan to distribute it as a .jar file containing the beans + the mapping files (*.hbm.xml and hibernate.cfg.xml) without any connection parameters as datasource, jdbc url, username, password, dialect... so the people would only have to supply a valid hibernate.properties file to set their connection up.

is it possible?

thanks a lot!

I'm also new to hibernate and can't say if that's possible or not, I think not though, I recall people having problems with both.
Anyway, you can also set the connection up programatically, using params, or whatever input the first time, and save it to file or whatever.
A little closer to what you want is to have them supply a connection.properties file for instance and you use that

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/reference/en/html/session-configuration.html#configuration-xmlconfig
"An alternative approach is to specify a full configuration in a file named hibernate.cfg.xml. This file can be used as a replacement for the hibernate.properties file or, if both are present, override properties."

thanks, I would have prefered properties to override the xml but I'll have to live with it.

In the Chapter 3 of the online reference you can find all methods to passing parameters to the Configuration object and to create a Session.

In your case you can keep a properties file inside your jar and require an other properties file with installation specific setting.
Then you can build a Configuration creating a Properties object with all these properties.

So you can also limit the option that a user can set and choose their names