I have just started working with Hibernate. I have a table called Candidate in a database in which the field ORIGINAL_ID is the primary key. ORIGINAL_ID is of type VARCHAR2. I already have a POJO in a class called test.Candidate. The property 'fid' in this class corresponds to the field ORIGINAL_ID in the table.

I am in the process of writing a mapping file pertaining to the Candidate table. If I want to map it to a POJO then my mapping would look like:

<hibernate-mapping>
<class name="test.Candidate" table="Candidate">
<id name="fid" type="string" unsaved-value="null" >
<column name="ORIGINAL_ID" sql-type="varchar2(15)" not-null="true"/>
<generator class="?????"/>
</id>
.
.
. <<other-stuff>>
</hibernate-mapping>

My question is what should be put in place of the ????? for the generator class. I guess I could use any of the built-in implementations of the IdentifierGenerator interface. However, my confusion stems from the fact that it seems that the generated id should map to some column in the database. I want to make the ORIGINAL_ID column be the place from which Hibernate can draw the unique generated id. However, most of the built-in generators can produce long, short or int for the id. So I cannot except such generators to use ORIGINAL_ID.

What should be my approach to handle such a problem?

Thanks in advance.

See
http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/reference/en/html/mapping.html#mapping-declaration-id

You can implement your own generator class or you can use the builtin generators uuid.hex, uuid.string which produce string identifiers,