Hello,

Advice is sought as to the best practices of application design with Hibernate. I have classes that represent persistent objects. Classes (java files) are generated from the mappings, and the database structure is also generated from the mappings.

I need toi implement certain functionality pertaining to each class/object. For example, a persisted parent contains a list of children. The Application should be able to find easily a certain child and perform some operations on it (such as remove, update, sort, etc etc.). The logical way of doing this is implement a method in the Parent class that will do all the work. However, it would involve the manual modification of the mapping class, and therefore the auto-generation of java files from mappings will involve copy-paste work each time (I'll have to move the methods to the newly generated java files). Besides, this approach is a bit against the whole Entity paradigm. The classes are supposed to be minimal, as they represent the object themselves, and do not contain business logic.

Is there a better way of solving this problem?

Thanks for your suggestions.

you should always add business logic into your POJO when it is possible.
Restricting a POJO into a simple entity persistent objet is a kind of antipattern we all know thanks to EJB 1.
Now how to use this when generating classes, mappings files... this is another question.

I have a similar problem.. I rely on my mapping files, to update database schema as well as generate the beans for me. To add additional logic into the beans I simply extend them from a base class that implements the logic.

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