say i got two tables

employee
empid
name
RoleID

and

employeeRoles
RoleID
roleType

I would like to create a subclass eg. called manager (roletype=manager) with the same properties as employee
how would the mapping file look like ?

David

AFAIK, you can't use subclass without a discriminator-value column in your employee table.

But joined-subclass might work here...
(for more details, read Inheritance Mapping)

If you can't alter the tables you should map employeeRoles to a separate class and define an association between them. this design is more flexible because allows an employee to have more than one role (i think this also happens in real life...)

Radu