Hibernate supports 3 basic inheritence mapping strategies - one is "Table per subclass, using a discriminator.

For example:

<class name="Payment" table="PAYMENT">
<id name="id" type="long" column="PAYMENT_ID">
<generator class="native"/>
</id>
<discriminator column="PAYMENT_TYPE" type="string"/>
<property name="amount" column="AMOUNT"/>
...
<subclass name="CreditCardPayment" discriminator-value="CREDIT">
<join table="CREDIT_PAYMENT">
<property name="creditCardType" column="CCTYPE"/>
...
</join>
</subclass>
<subclass name="CashPayment" discriminator-value="CASH">
<join table="CASH_PAYMENT">
...
</join>
</subclass>
<subclass name="ChequePayment" discriminator-value="CHEQUE">
<join table="CHEQUE_PAYMENT" fetch="select">
...
</join>
</subclass>
</class>

Does NHibernate support such a strategy? If not, what is the best way to accomplish this type of inheritence?

Thanks.

NHibernate 1.0 is the port of Hibernate 2.1, so it supports "table-per-class-hierarchy" (your case), "table-per-subclass" and "table-per-concrete-class" strategies.

Read subclass and joined-subclass documentation.

KPixel, as i understood it's not exactly his case. jpflick1 want to store parts of the class in different tables and use discriminator column to decide, what tables must be joined.
This strategy is not supported now. You can either use discriminator and store all the class hierarchy in one table, or use joins, but no discriminators then.

Thanks for the responses. xor, you are correct in what I was wanting to accomplish. Combining the the <subclass> and <join> elements to make a <joined-subclass> looses some of the flexibility that is in Hibernate.

Just to be clear, the <joined-subclass> is not a hack that NHibernate did that reduced funtionality compared to Hibernate. Hibernate 2.1.x has <joined-subclass>. Hibernate 3 has the <join> element you want to use. NHibernate currently matches Hibernate 2.1.x. Getting NHibernate up to Hibernate 3.x functionality is one of the next major goals, but it hasn't happened yet.