Hi,
I'm new to Hibernate Search. I'd like to add Hibernate Search capabilities to an existing application that uses Hibernate mappings already specified in .hbm.xml. As we have a couple of different configurations (with different mappings), I would prefer to keep using the XML approach rather than using Annotations so that the mappings can be easily switched.

Chapter 1 of the Hibernate Search user documentation says that Hibernate Search can be used without Annotations, however when I've searched the forums and online I have not turned up much information about doing this.

Is it possible to specify the mappings from entities to the index structure entirely in the XML files without using Annotations?
If it is, could someone please point me towards some documentation or examples?

Thanks,
Anna

What the documentation means is that you do not have to use Hibernate Annotations in order to specify your domain model. You can most definitely keep the domain configuration in xml files. However, Hibernate Search has its own set of annotations which are used to configure Lucene and entity to document mappings. There is no xml alternative for this. You will have to use annotations.

As I said before, this is probably round a week of work for someone to implement an XML model. The infrastructure is ready.

Hi

Is there an update on whether there will be an alternative to hibernate search annotations? Personally I don't have a problem with the search annotations but I know there are people who get really funny about annotations...same way they were funny about xml configuration files! There is no pleasing some people....


Thanks

A few people showed up to contribute, but vanished afterwards :)

How can i contribute with the implementation of the xml configuration for hibernate search?

Sorry for the delay, I just put some instructions on the wiki area. Let me know what you think

http://www.hibernate.org/443.html

I think the Hibernate Search Reference is causing this! No doubt!
I think a 48 pages document won't be hard to change!
And this topic is a very good matter to ask such change!

No reference document should leave ambiguities about how the thing is installed, configured, maintained, its dependencies and so on.

How can we purpose a change to the reference document?

The subject is about a new, currently non existing, feature: describing Hibernate Search metadata in XML rather than annotations. What are you talking about?

The configurations/mappings for HibernateSearch can be done by two ways:
HIBERNATE ANNOTATIONS or
HIBERNATE COMMONS ANNOTATIONS.
And it can't be done by XML.

Despite the reference says "you can use it WITHOUT HIBERNATE ANNOTATIONS" it doesn't says what is the alternative way.

Curiously, the reference uses the alternative way (hibernate-commons-annotations) throughout the whole book!

In Hibernate Core, the alternative way for Hibernate Annotations is XML.
In Hibernate Search, the alternative way for Hibernate Annotations is another kind of Annotations!

Once I understood it, i got it running.

The configurations/mappings for HibernateSearch can be done by two ways:
HIBERNATE ANNOTATIONS or
HIBERNATE COMMONS ANNOTATIONS.
And it can't be done by XML.

Despite the reference says "you can use it WITHOUT HIBERNATE ANNOTATIONS" it doesn't says what is the alternative way.

Curiously, the reference uses the alternative way (hibernate-commons-annotations) throughout the whole book!

In Hibernate Core, the alternative way for Hibernate Annotations is XML.
In Hibernate Search, the alternative way for Hibernate Annotations is another kind of Annotations!

Once I understood it, i got it running.

Ah you misunderstood it.
You can use either annotations or XML to map the ORM metadata for your entities. That's what the doc says.
But you need to use annotation to map the Search metadata for your entities.

Hibernate Annotations is a product http://annotations.hibernate.org.

I created a new Jira issue http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HSEARCH-180 where I started to collect a few necessary documentation updates. Even though this thread was initially really about a completely new feature, I think we still could make the documentation a little less ambiguous.