Hi all -

I realize this is probably going to either sound really stupid or naive (or both) :)

But, if I have an existing inheritance hierarchy in my application and I annotate this hierarchy to use the single table method...

Can or (will) the existing hierarchy be able to operate as it previously did?

Meaning I have a factory that builds two types of products (from the hierarchy) would this still function or would annotating this for hibernate mean I must use hibernate at all times when working with these classes.

For example the factory uses a regular DAO style sql to build these two products.

The crux of the problem is that I have a separate class that will hold a collection of the two types of products that I was going to try to use hibernate to populate, but from what I am reading I would need to entity map the existing hierarchy to do so.

I ran a very simple test and the annotated code seems to be able to work just fine outside of the hibernate world.


Page 70. of Java Persistence w/ Hibernate about the 2nd paragraph helps clear it up as well.