Hi,

think of the following scenario: you have a class Person with firstname and surename, both with getters and setters.

Since your table is large you want to avoid a full table scan when doing queries and therefore introduce an additional "SEARCH_NAME" column with an index.

In the Java class you have a derived attribute returning this search name:

public String getSearchName() {
return getFirstname() + getSurname();
}

If I use

<property name="SearchName" column="SEARCH_NAME" length="80" type="java.lang.String" not-null="true" index="IDX_SEARCH_NAME"/>

I get an error that there is no "setter" method for this property on the Java class - but since it is derived I dont want to provide a setter method.

How would one map these in the *.hbm.xml file, so that:
- the search name is persisted too
- I dont have to provide a setter (since it is computed)

Is there something like a "write-only" property?

Thx
T.

As far as I know Hibernate requires a public setter in order to assign the value to your POJO.

Having said that, there are a couple of ways you could deal with this:
If you do not want the users of your POJO to be able to have access to that method then you would probably have to have them interact with the POJO through an interface that does not have the setter on it. Of course this would not keep someone from casting the interface to the implementation and getting access to the setter that way. If that level of information hiding is not acceptable then you'll have to find a different way.

An alternative and possibly more attractive way is to use a component to combine the first name and surname properties. I don't know how this would affect indexing though.