Hi,

I am quite new in using Hibernate, but unfortunately I am required to perform a quite challenging task.

Our Document Management application would like to have a capability to create / alter some profile tables on runtime. The idea is different departments' users may have to enter different information when they upload the documents. I understand that this could be achieved by a proper database design, without doing such complicated things on runtime. However, we would just like to explore this as an alternative.

I have been searching from the net a few days but all those answers didn't tell a complete solution. I am not demand an answer providing me the complete code, which is spoon feeding. But at least, I am looking for the total solution in high level.

It will be great if any hibernate master could tell me what is the API / command to create / alter tables on runtime, how to generate a corresponding hbm.xml file (or any replacement of hbm.xml here?), how to generate corresponding persistent class (I understand that we could use hashmap instead, but is it suitable in this case?), and any other things that I need to take note.

Many thanks in advance, and I wish to receive experts' guidance soon.
Thanks.