Hi,

I'm planning an application and am evaluating Hibernate because I'm thinking about possibly using ot for that. My application provides an abstract access to a database (read-only). It's supposed to be able to read data from any tables and return an object with an array property containing the values (like "name" => "dsds", "date" => Date Object etc). That means I want to be able to map any tables to always the same object (of course I don't want to create the classes to map with a one-class-per-table approach everytime I configure a new table). I hope the explanation was understandable.
Does anybody know if or how I could do that using Hibernate? I think it would provide me with a lot of functionality. Would it be maybe sufficient if I would just write my own Loader or Persister class?

Looks like <dynamic-class> in Hibernate3 is what you need.

is there any documentation for that?

No :) Works the same as <class>, but you get a Map of property-name, value tuples

alright, I'll try to find out myself. Is Hibernate3 ready for use or is it really alpha? I know there's no a stable release but perhaps everything I need (I don't need any writing to the DB etc.) is including and running already?

I just recognized another possiblity to solve my problem. wouldn't it be possible to generate the class files for the tables i want to read from the db using hbm2java? as far as i understand it that would create the class files with get and set methods so that hibernate would create instances of the classes according to the data in the table. the only thing i would have to do is to add a method for each class that returns all properties as a set of key/value pairs.
is that correct? would that work or am i wrong?

hbm2java simply produces Classes NOT instances.

The tool doesnt generate .class files. It generates .java files and those files are based off of the Hibernate Mapping files - not the database, as you can gather from its name - hbm2java.

Anyway, hope that helps.