I am doing a brown bag today on Hibernate and I am trying to get a few quick questions answered.

1) When are mapping files loaded? I believe it can be on server startup. 2) Are the mapping files stored in memory for retrieval of mapping information when the application makes requests to Hibernate?
3) When using XDoclet or Annotations to generate the mapping files. How do you represent this in the hibernate.cfg.xml for the "mapping resource", I know this is where you can directly list all the mapping files you use? But XDoclet/Annotations are generating these files during the build process. Will Hibernate just look in the classpath for all mapping files to load or do you have to actually specifically tell Hibernate where to load mapping files from?

Thanks,

-jay

1) The mapping data is read and a configuration object populated at the time the session factory is built. Mapping files are read once the meta data is contained in the configuration object which is normally thrown away.

2) (a)XDoclet is an external process that generates the mapping files for you rather than you create them yourself.
(b)Annotations are embedded and are read and processed when session factory is built. See annotation examples for how this is done.