Hello everyone - This is my first post and was wondering what the best way (or recommendation) for changing mappings dynamically.

What I have is a MS Db (or multiples) from a 3rd party and depending on the version of the application, the hibernate mappings need to change.

For example: Table 1 tells me the version of the application and when Table 1 says 11, then the type column in Table 2 means (say) Object X, but when Table one says 12, then the type column in Table 2 means Object Y.

My goal is to read the version from Table 1 and when it's 11 then map (subclasses actually) Object X to type 1, Object Y to type 2.

But when Table 1 says it's 12 I need to switch the subclass mapping to Object X to type 1 and Object Z to type 2, switching Object Y from 2 to 3.

Let me know if I need to post more details.

The only thing that comes to mind is executing some straight JDBC queries at startup and then using the info gained to build a SessionFactory programmatically. You'd then ship all supported versions of a mapping (and entities?) with your application and choose them based on the initial non-Hibernate queries.