I am just wondering why Hibernate Annotations doesn't provide the same feature as <properties> & <formula> elements from Hibernate?

i.e.
<class name="Department"
table="DEPARTMENT">
....
<one-to-one name="manager"
property-ref="managerReference">
<formula>'Manager'</formula>
<formula>ID</formula>
</one-to-one>
</class>

<class name="Employee"
table="EMPLOYEE">

<properties name="managerReference">
<property name="title"/>

<many-to-one name="department"
class="Department"
column="DEPARTMENT_ID"/>
</properties>


As on working on a legacy database, it is very useful.

I am actually looking for a good syntax to support that

EXCELLENT!
As it is very powerful feature which is *STRONG* asked to be implemented in the final release of Hibernate Annotation.

When I mean looking for, I really mean proposals. I don't have a good one for now.
Not sure it is strongly asked, there were no opened JIRA issue for it. I've oepned it, vote for it
http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/ANN-394

As of a long-historic application, i.e. banking systems, it is definately impossible to update a legacy data model, and the design of the model is always crap (everty table has a composite key, and there is no any foreign key at all... sometimes you can't believe it! but it is always over there).

It is obviously not enough if we are only limited within the annotations from the standard EJB3 spec. But fortunately, we find Hibernate core's <properties> and <formula> features are very powerful because they can help us a lot to deal with these cases. So I think please consider providing the same features of Hibernate core on Annotations, so that it can be used not only on the new system, but also on the legacy system. IMO, there are a lot of big applications expecially from finacial , banking, government industries which data model are always irregular and crap, the kind of requirement is very important if you hope your product can be used in these situations very well.

As of a long-historic application, i.e. banking systems, it is definately impossible to update a legacy data model, and the design of the model is always crap (everty table has a composite key, and there is no any foreign key at all... sometimes you can't believe it! but it is always over there).

It is obviously not enough if we are only limited within the annotations from the standard EJB3 spec. But fortunately, we find Hibernate core's <properties> and <formula> features are very powerful because they can help us a lot to deal with these cases. So I think please consider providing the same features of Hibernate core on Annotations, so that it can be used not only on the new system, but also on the legacy system. IMO, there are a lot of big applications expecially from finacial , banking, government industries which data model are always irregular and crap, the kind of requirement is very important if you hope your product can be used in these situations very well.

you guys did notice emmanuel saying that he were looking for suggestion on how to add this, right ? :) We want it as much as you guys, but annotations are not really built for this kind of declaration.

In the meanwhile do realize that you can (to a certain degree) have both hbm.xml and annotations in the same project allowing to have parts of both worlds.

Yep, currenly I think it is only way we can do.
Thanks anyway.