I'm using Hibernate version 3.0 and Oracle 9i.

I understand Hibernate can use XDoclet in the mapping files to use sequences to auto-generate values for fields but is there a way to deal with sequences directly with Hibernate?

Basically I want to have a method called "generateID()" which uses Hibernate to access the my ID_SEQ sequence in the database and return the value as a Long which I can then go on and use in my application. Is this possible?

First of all you no longer need to use XDoclet - java annotations are way better solution because they do not require any pre-compile steps to be performed.

There is no direct access to sequences used to generate IDs in hibernate itself. Still you can use direct JDBC access (on session.connection() or HibernateTemplate in spring framework dao) to do what you want.

Please rate if that helped.