I'm using Hibernate 2.1.8, with XDoclet. I have a class, which I'll call Thing, and another class which extends it, which I'll call SubThing. I want to map each of these to their own table. SubThing does not have all the properties of Thing, so I want the SubThing table to have fewer columns.

Now, as it is, when Hibernate updates the schema it gives the 'sub_thing' table all the same columns as 'thing'. I thought perhaps if I overrode the 'get...' methods whose properties I did not need in the subclass, so they just returned null and lacked the XDoclet comments, Hibernate would not create columns for them but this is not the case. How, then, should I suppress these properties so no columns are created for them?

Have you tried something like this?

<class name="Thing" table="THING" >
<property name="thingName" column="THINGNAME"/>

<joined-subclass name="SubThing" table="SUBTHING">
<key column="THING_ID">
<property name="subThingName" column="SUBTHINGNAME"/>
</joined-subclass>

</class>

Thanks, I'll investigate that. What I've actually done in the meantime is to refactor the code so that the common stuff is in an abstract class (AbstractThing) which ComplexThing and SimpleThing both extend. It works for this case but isn't really an answer to the general question.