I've got an entity mapped that's using the table-per-class-hierarchy design. As a result, there's a discriminator column called 'itemtype'. This is all working fine and Hibernate correctly instantiates the appropriate subclass. However, my code needs to be able to directly acess that itemtype property as in: myItem.getItemType(). To do that, I mapped a property separate from the discriminator which doesn't update or insert:
<property name="itemType" column="itemtype" not-null="true" update="false" insert="false" />

Unfortunately, this value doesn't seem to be set by Hibernate until after the object is first saved to the db. But my code needs to be able to get the value at any time (whether or not it has been saved). Is there any way to obtain the value before Hibernate has saved the object?

In the constructor that your API uses, call the appropriate setItermType method. You have to do it manually, because your requirement is to have it done before hibernate knows that the object exists. There's no hibernate short cut that'll help you.

ok, that's what i figured. But I was hoping there might be a way to 'register' the unsaved object with Hibernate so that it could set the discriminator field. heheh wishful thinking.

thanks for the help

Hello chipman,

In HQL you can use the .class property to extract the discriminator. Any in java comparisons should be done one the class name or using the instanceof
operator

e.g.

session.createQuery ("select i.class from Item i")

or if (i instanceof SubItem) {}