I just read the Hibernate Annotations Reference Manual, and I see some great features which are not available via XML mapping files. It appears that new features (like Temporal Property mapping) are only being introduced in Annotations.

What is the future of XML mapping files? Are they being deprecated? Will they be updated to support all Annotation features?

Thanks in advance,
Daniel Serodio

temporal types is afaik just a subset of hibernates type system - why do you refer to it as something new ?

I mention Temporal Property mapping because I hadn't heard about it before, including the "Time-Slices Entities" thread (http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=929382).

My main concern is actually Java 5 enums. In the "Persisting jdk1.5 enums today" thread (http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=933393), it became clear to me that Annotation-based mappings have features that XML-based mappings don't. See (mine) second-to-last post in the JDK1.5 enum thread for example.

Temporal Property mapping has nothing to do with time-slicing.

And afaik the Java 5 enums is equally supported in hbm.xml afaik. You can just use the type defined in the annotations package in the hbm.xml.

again of course EJB 3 can use some of the enhancements in Java 5 we cant directly support in Hibernate for compability reasons - but again, enums works fine in both worlds afaik.

I'm using the nomenclature coined by Martin Fowler's Analysis Patterns "Patterns for things that change with time" article (http://www.martinfowler.com/ap2/timeNarrative.html).

As I understand it, Temporal Property == "time-sliced" property.
The "Time-Slices Entities" thread describe what Fowler calls "Temporal Object", which is also called "Version History"

Aren't Temporal Property and Temporal Object closely related?

Please read my comment on the mentioned thread (http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.ph ... 34#2283334); as far as this Forum's community knows, it's not possible to use a "XML mapped" enum as a query parameter, while it is possible with a "annotation mapped" enum.

no Temporal just mean "something that is time related". temporal property is just EJB3 terms for what you from hibernate knows as date, time and timestamp.

again, using the same type as the one in annotations should give you the same features (assuming you are using hibernate3 api and not ejb3 api)

Okay, I misunderstood the Temporal Property mapping then.

WRT enums, I just tried what you suggested, but I've found that in order to
I'd need to use Hibernate 3.1 (because of org.hibernate.util.ReflectHelper.classForName), and 3.1 is not backwards-compatible with Hibernate 3.0, which I'm currently using (see HHH-1435 for example).

..so copy and change it to use the older reflecthelper if you want to run it on hibernate 3.0