I have read through the Hibernate documentation regarding Inheritance. It is unclear however if the column name that is used as the discriminator also needs to be a member of the class. Because the class type can be determined by this discriminator and vice versa, I am not sure it should be needed. Could someone please clarify this for me?

For example, if I have the following tables:

CAT
--------------------
cat_id
cat_type_id
cat_name

CAT_TYPE
--------------------
cat_type_id
cat_type_name ex. Bengal, Persian, Siamese etc


If I created an abstract class "Cat", would I need to have "cat_type_id" as a member variable (so that it would be inherited by the different types)?

Regards,

Joshua

The descriminator field must be defined in your base class (afaik).

Look at http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/reference/en/html/mapping.html#mapping-declaration-discriminator

and

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/reference/en/html/example-mappings.html#example-mappings-authorwork

the discriminator is a column which determines the type of the class, it doesn't have to be mapped to a class property

True.. I should have written the discriminator should be defined in the mapping of your base class...

Thanks for your help.

Joshua