After some confusion, I recently discovered that the current release of Hibernate Annotations (3.1b7) does not support maps.

I only recently started with Hibernate, so I started using Hibernate Annotations right away. The appeal was obvious -- I guess it wasn't obvious that certain essential things weren't implemented yet, but this is to be expected from the big "beta" label. :-)

So I annotated all of the classes I want to persist, and now that I've found out about missing map support, I am left with the question of what to do. Although the documentation says that hbm files and annotations can be "mixed and matched", it is apparently not possible to use both an hbm file and annotations together to set up persistence for a particular class.

I have classes with, let's say, 20 properties that I want to persist. 1 or 2 in any case may be a map. Do I have any other option, other than to create an entire hbm file for the class, leaving the annotations in that class unused? Is there some secret/special/experimental way that I might be able to just define the <map> stuff in an hbm file, and still use the rest of the annotations that are already there?

I know it's a long shot, just wondering. Thanks for such a fantastic product.

This is planned ANN-1
but Map are not really something useful from a elational POV. You probably can workaround and avoid using it.

You cannot use hbm and annotation on the same hierarchy (hence on the same class).

Patch welcome, BTW :-)

Actually, I had been trying to deal with maps using something like this example:


But no matter what I did, some of the SQL generated would always contain a "formula" referring to a column that didn't exist. As far as I understood, this was supposed to be used as a discriminator. (I originally did not have the @Inheritance annotation at the top, but adding it did not seem to change whether this "formula" got created.) I don't see the need for a discriminator in my case, though maybe I misunderstand something -- in any case, I could not make this formula go away, and so my load operations were always failing because of requests for this column.

When I searched for errors similar to mine (on the Hibernate site including forum, in JIRA, on the web in general), I didn't find someone in exactly the same situation, but did find several admonitions that map support wasn't implemented yet.

But maybe I was closer to the right incantation than I thought? That would be great. I don't really want to have to use the hbm files at all....