Is there any documentation or examples regarding how one can go about extending some of the hibernate internals with custom components? I have reviewed the docs and thought I would ask before taking the task of trial and error with the code.

-Matt

Well, there are many wiki entries about implementing custom UserTypes, Interceptors, and Lifecycles.

I've not really seen much docs or examples of creating custom ClassPersister implementations. There is one custom ClassPersister in the test suite. Other than that there is always the source code; start with AbstractEntityPersister and EntityPersister.

Is there something in particular you are trying to do?

We are trying to get Hibernate not to rely on concrete classes. I was able to dig up information about dynamic-class, basically a Map that represents an object. We have our own object that is esentially a map of somesorts with name/value pairs, but a lot more. We are trying to use this instead of the Map so we can avoid having to take the results of the map and them wrap the map objects into our own objects.

We have also found that we can use PropertyAccessor to handle the getter/setter issue for own own custom objects. Now the big issue comes with actually creating instances of our own objects. ClassPersister might not be the correct place, but the method instantiate(serializable) looked promising for this if it could be overridden.

Any help would be much appreciated in the matter. Thanks again for all the good work you guys (and gals if there are any) that you have done.

-Matt

Well it depends exactly what you are trying to do. If all you really need is to be able to tie into entity instantiation, a lighter-weight way would be to implement Interceptor.instantiate().