I am developing a framework that uses hibernate for persistence. I am trying to figure out a way to have a central config for attributes in the hbm.xml files. For example, I would like to be able to change all the table/column names without having to edit the hbm.xml files in the framework. Any best practices? Thoughts?

-Anthony

and NamingStrategy is not what you want ?

NamingStrategy is not what I was looking for. NamingStrategy (and corrent me if I am wrong) looks to be a method for doing things like appending a prefix to table/column names and other such tasks.

What I want to do with the framework I am developing is not force table/column names the others that may use this framework. For example I may call a table "usr" and someone else may want to name the table "organization_user" or if the person speaks a different language than myself they may want to have all the table/column names in thier native language. I want to do complete substitutions. Without wading through the hbm.xml files it would be nice to have a single properties file that could hold all of this such as:

table.user.name=USER
table.company.name=COMPANY

Makes sense? Any thoughts?

-Anthony

You can easily write some code that manipulates the net.sf.hibernate.mapping metamodel.

yes - you are right about the *intended* usage of NamingStrategy but what is the problem with having a NamingStrategy that reads your propertyfile and returns column and table names based on that ?

ahhh! I was looking at NamingStrategy in the Hibernate Reference when you first mentioned this and it did not make clear how this could be used. After you posted back I opened up "Hibernate in Action" and the javadocs and see there is a bit more to this. Thank you for pointing out the solution twice :)

-Anthony

tip for future reference: Look in the source - normally much faster ;)

I have a case where I want to name all my primary key columns to '<table_name>_id' instead of 'id' to avoid ambiguity. Since I am already implementing a NamingStrategy to convert camelCase to underscores as in ImprovedNamingStrategy, I wanted to attempt to automatically create enhanced primary key column naming too.

Looking at the NamingStrategy Interface and the ImprovedNamingStrategy implementation, I don't see that it is possible to obtain a reference to the parent class/table name of the current property. Am I correct in this observation? Has anyone else attempted to do this?