I've been using Hibernate for my database work now for a few months and am very impressed with the capabilities of the package -- it's exactly the right tool for the job.

Unfortunately, I have to write my code for users with different requests/standards and one of them is the capability to update the database from the Hibern8IDE utility. I understand you can do this with beanshell, but this requires a knowledge of the Hibernate language or SQL. What they'd really like is the ability to browse items in the database with the JOI interface and then update one of the values by hand.

I appreciate that there may be complications with providing such a capability, the most important being database integrity as we don't want users mucking up the very nice pointers it setup and verified. However, I do want to provide the capability for a ("smart") user to update one or more values by hand (after most of it has been done by a Hibernate utilizing program) without having to re-learn SQL or HQL every few weeks.

I could use some other utility for updating the database by hand, but I'd really like to use the Hibern8IDE interface since it will display the interactions between tables for my users. Is it even feasible to add this capability to the IDE? Is it on anyone's timeline? If not, can I help?

Thanks for the help,

stephen

I'm sure Max would love to have someone helping him on Hibern8IDE!

In my quest to look into adding this feature to the Hibern8IDE, I contacted the author of JOI (Manfred Duchrow). In order to have the ability to change the elements in the database using the JOI interface, first we needed the capability in JOI to update elements (till now, it only allowed viewing the contents). Manfred was extraordinarily helpful and my query to add this capability to JOI resulted in a very busy weekend for him where he added this, and several other, capabilities.

At the end of the weekend he passed me a beta version of JOI 2.1 which includes the capability to edit primitive types. Simply including this jar in my classpath worked perfectly with the current version of the IDE and allowed me to update the fields in the JOI interface. I think all that's needed now is the capability of the IDE to commit those user edited changes to the database.

Of course I am surely belittlling what is more than a small undertaking but I haven't yet dug through the IDE code to see how difficult this would be. Before I start, can anyone comment? Will this be simple or difficult to add? Can I help?

stephen

p.s. I have a copy of the beta version of the new JOI and permission from Manfred to share this with Hibernate developers. Contact me for the library. He suspects he will release this version in May which gives us time to release an updated IDE if we're quick.