Can I get at the <meta> elements of a mapping? The normal elements are accessible via SessionFactory.getClassMetadata, but I can't see how to get to the meta elements.

Alternatively, is there some way to mark a property in a mapping file so that I can get its name in java code?

I'll explain what I'm trying to do, in case anyone can point out a better way. Many of the objects in my app have a "point-of-contact" member, which is the higher-level object that is responsible for that object. For example, Book has getAuthor, Pet has getOwner, Car has getRegisteredOwner, Child has getLegalGuardian, etc. How do I get the name of the property (or specifically, the many-to-one mapping) of those point-of-contact members, so that I can dynamically build an HQL query to get it from the object that I start with?

The only solution I've come up with so far is to put the mapping name as a class member of the "owned" object, but I don't want to put hibernate details in my POJO code if there's an alternative.

Can you use plain old java reflection - Pet.class.getDeclaredMethods()
and then figure out which get is the one you want?

Configuration.getClassMapping("Your persistentClass").getProperty("Property name").getMetaAttribute("attribute name").getValue()

I think that using reflection and heuristics would be undesirable. Not only is it mixing up business logic and data access code, it's also extremely slow compared to almost any alternative.

The Configuration.* route looks good, but SessionFactories don't maintain a link to their Configurations; I'd have to store the Configuration somewhere for this purpose, and search through it every time I wanted one of these points of contact. Even caching the reference in a class variable would probably end up having a performance hit, because all of this is in a webapp so there's new classloaders involved for every session. However, I think I'll be able to make other uses of getClassMappings(), now that you've pointed it out to me.

I think I'm going to have to store the reference in a class constant. It's inelegant but efficient and correct.

Thanks for the ideas, guys.