(FYI, I've read all the FAQs, searched the forum, and read the hmtl docs, read the HIA book. I've seen several posts on interface mappings, but all seemed to dead-end with no definitive answer.)

- I would like to persist a hiearchy of classes implementing an interface with no shared base class.
- I don't want to declare 'getId, getVersion, etc' in the interface (I'm using aspectwerkz to introduce these methods as a mixin to the concrete classes.)
- I want table-per-hierarchy

Can I get table-per-hierarchy without a base class?

I have defined a mapping against the interface, which included

<id name="id">
<generator class="native"/>
</id>
<discriminator type="string"/>
<version name="version"/>

And had the concrete mappings extend this. But of course this required getId, getVersion in the interface. This is what I'm trying to eliminate. Is there a way to achieve this?

thanks!

-barry

Interesting question.

So, you have everything implementing an interface. Then all the implementers define the same-named version and id property. I think you can handle this by writing a custom PropertyAccessor, but add something to JIRA, cos I think we can be a little less strict in one of our checks, and make this work.

One of the common issues I run into is that the business interface often does not define a setter for a property. Since hibernate requests this getter while parsing the config file, I wrote a custom PropertyAccessor that defers the creation of the Getter/Setter until get/set is actually called.

However, without a common base class defering Getter/Setter creation fails as the method to set the property will be different for the concrete classes, while hibernate stores only a single setter as part of the interface info.

It seems what is needed to solve this problem is to define a class mapping that whose definition are inherited by extending classes, but is not processed independently (ie, config file inheritance only).

Is this what you think can be done Gavin? It would seem that the 2.1 branch would need much refactoring to make this possible since the xml parsing and the processing of the xml are intertwinded. I have not yet looked at the 3.x codebase. Is it different there? Or am I just missing something else?

BTW, my underlying motivation is to introduce persistence into a project completly as an aspect. eg, One project defines pure business concerns and a second project defines the mappings; introduces Persistable interface along with default method impls of getId, setVersion, etc; introduces a default no-arg constructor; etc.