I'd like to get some opinions on what would be the best way to implement a features property. I have an object that has many "features" associated with it, properties such as "supports_xml" or "uses_department_code". I'd like to avoid a separate column for each feature, since there are so many of them. I'd also like to avoid creating a table linking features to objects.

Is there a way to implement this in an .hbm.xml? Prior to hibernate, we would store an integer in the database and logical-or it with powers of 2 to extract the state of a property, but I suspect with hibernate there is a more elegant solution.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Storing an integer and ORing is fine. To incorporate this into hibernate you should create a dedicated type (e.g. org.hibernate.usertype.UserType) and a corresponding object.

Once you have create your type and the object (say FetauresType and Features) you can do something like



and from you description I would suppose that the Features object would be simply



HTH, PL

If I wanted to create a direct method such as entity.supportsXml() instead of entity.getFeatures().supportsXml(), is this possible within the .hbm.xml? I am using the hbm2java for POJO generation and my understanding is that the only way to use .supportsXml() as an abbreviation for .getFeatures().supportsXml() would be to add it into the POJO.

Another option could be to store those data as 1 XML (and if you want OO feature use JAXB). However you will lose the option of sorting/searching by those attributes.