I am trying to somehow customize the output that Hibernate Tools is generating, specifically the DAO classes and I would like to enable generics.

I am using the tools from within Eclipse - the plugin. So I am lost when reading the documentation and postings here. Say for enabling generics, the doc on Hibernate Ant Tools says to put something into a build.xml file.

I don't have such a file, and I don't actually know what it would be used for. My intention is to click on Hibernate Artifact Generation and go.

Am I missing something very basic here?

there is a switch for the generics w/ no need to customize output, however I don't see one in the plugin version that I have installed. in true open source manner ... check cvs ;)

You can Customize generated output by clicking on the checkbox labelled "Use custom Templates" in the artifact generation wizard dialog screen. This will enable a template directory control for you to browse to. Specify a directory which contains dao/dao.vm , where dao/dao.vm is a copied resource from the hibernate-tools.jar.

This tells the plug in, don't use the velocity template in the jar file, use this one on my hard drive.

I downloaded and installed the latest nightly build. Looked for a switch for producing generics and could not find one. Where would that switch be?

I now understand the custom templates, so this probably helps be getting the DAOs I want.
However, how can I tell the tools that I want a DAO interface and a DAO implementation for each class?

its not in the ui at the moment. put a request in jira.

the last thing about additional codegeneration is best expressed via ant...when i get around to it you will have the same options in eclipse (by allowing dynamic addition of exporters in the ui)

Which brings me back to my initial problem. How would I generate classes with generics today? As I don't have a build.xml file now, how would I create one that does what I want? Would this interfere with the stuff the plugin does?

you go read the docs at tools.hibernate.org about the ant files.

<hbm2java generics="true" ..> should give you a good start ;)

My apologies for being slow off the mark. This is perhaps not event a H3 tools question.

My problem is not what to put in the build.xml, but the file in general.

I don't get an understanding where I would get a build.xml file from or how I would generate one in Eclipse. Furthermore, if I had one, how would I run the code generation? Would that be done automatically (if so when?) or can I trigger that manually (very much like I do now with the plugin).

best thing you could do then is to go read about Ant at ant.apache.org

Ok, I got it to work. The learning curve is quite steep if you come from the plugin UI and are pointed to the build.xml.

My second question was how to generate DAO interfaces and I will open another thread for that as it has nothing to do with this.