I am working with a system of hibernate classes, written by another party. The problem is that it has over 150 tables - subclasses and one-to-many buckets.

What I would like is if I could tell hibernate that when there's a one-to-many relation, or a subclass, the relation should be mapped not by another table but by XML deposited in a field.

That way, the relational links between my entities are represented as relational joins, but the bletcherous details of my detail records could be held as an XML document. You use XML for content where the entity is essentially a bucket of stuff.

For bonus points, I'd like to be able to specify document types, namespaces and so on, so as to be able to validate against a schema.

For extra bonus - when stuff in the XML bucket has joins that I want to represent relationally rather than embedded, hibernate correctly uses XPTR to express thr relationl link.

I'll put this as an RFE in jira

I'll put this as an RFE in jira