Is there anything wrong with having two entities for the same table? I currently have a table with 300+ columns. I also have a search engine that only needs about 10 of these fields. I thought of creating a view in the database, but need to be able to fetch one-to-many associations (open session in view pattern) on occassion. I created an entity with only 10 columns (plus all the many to many and one-to-many associations) referencing the same 300 column table. This didn't seem to "break" anything so I am assuming this is okay? Is there anything wrong with this approach? Is there a better way? Many thanks.

I think it should be okay. I have done a similar thing myself and use the partial mapping for reading only. I guess it should be fine to update the 10 columns as well without affecting the other 290+.