Hello,

I have 2 questions:

1)

I would like to have access to the meta-information regarding whether a property maps to a non-null column, and to the column's size in the database. For instance, I would like to check the size of strings in the GUI code. Unfortunately, I don't see this information in anything reachable from ClassMetadata. Is there a way to navigate from ClassMetadata to the ColumnMetadata?

2)

I have an large entity that that is decomposed into a hierarchy of fine grained components, nested 3 or 4 levels deep. Hibernate maps empty components to null references, In my case, I would much rather have the components always be there, because otherwise the client code has the burden of testing for null values, and initializing when necessary.

Is there a way to turn off the mapping of components to nulls?


Thanks in advance for the help,
Ron

(1) Try Configuration.getClassMapping()

(2) If its a once off, use a CompositeUserType

Thanks for the quick reply. Just so I don't go down the wrong path here, let me impose on you one more time.

Regarding configuration.getClassMapping: Do you mean I should use PersistentClass.getPropertyIterator to get the properties as they are named in my classes, and then use getColumnIterator to retrieve the data about the schema? I guess Configuration is not thread safe, what about the other classes involved here. Should I harvest all the information I need at start-up time?

Thanks again,
Ron