Hi,

I'm in the planning phases of a project that has as a requirement the ability to change the datamodel at runtime. To accomplish this, our current plan is to use a set of static tables that will store entity metadata (e.g. datatypes, attributes, relationships, etc.) and then have a generic set of tables that will actually store the content, perhaps having Hibernate help out by actually creating new "subclass" tables for us on the fly (if possible).

So, the first thing I was wondering is can the dynamic model (mapping to Maps) can be configured/changed at runtime? Assuming that our meta-designer application could create either the necessary XML to describe the entity mapping, could we just re-load the session? or create a new session factory using that mapper? Has anyone had any success with doing that?

I'd also be grateful for any suggestions or links to other (open-source) projects that have similiar aspirations. In many ways, what we are building is akin to a database GUI (something like FileMaker Pro).

Thanks,
Hans

Hans,

I am also in need of this kind of feature and have been doing some research but couldn't really find any information on this. Did you find out anything more on this and pros and cons of this approach?.

Regards
Ulag

You can certainly use org.hibernate.mapping.* classes to manipulate your data model and its mappings, but I'd seriously question the need for such a dynamic data model unless you are writing some kind of database tool.

Hi,

I'm actually not sure what you mean with "changing the datamodell at runtime". Concerning hibernate there are three parts of the datamodell:
The database schema, the mapping files and the classes. Which of these three parts do you want to change at runtime?