I was hoping that Hibernate would automatically find *.hbm.xml files that were in the same package and named the same as their respective classes. This doesn't seem to occur and I couldn't find it in the documentation. The docs I found all seem to require the mapping files to be prespecified in the hibernate.cfg.xml file. I am in a situation where I cannot do that because I do not know at build time which classes will have mappings. Is there a configuration flag or something that will have Hibernate automatically find the mapping files at runtime?

Thank you.

Hi

The mapping files will be read at the startup itself.

So i you add a mapping file and add a entry for that in the hibernate.cfg.xml until the server is restarted the file will not be counted.

Can anybody give some more answer to this?

You can use Configuration.addResource() or addClass() to add mapping files at runtime.

You can also use Configuration.addDirectory(File).

This way all .hbm.xml in this directory will be processed by hibernate. If you need to add a new class, just put its mapping in the directory you specified.