We are currently using Hibernate 4.1.7 and in our application we extend the *_AUD tables with a few columns. Our current implementation used an EnversIntegrator (which received the integrate() call) to wrap the Configuration object in a proxy and then to intercept the Configuration.addDocument() calls. Once intercepted, we added the columns to the document description and then forwarded the call to the real Configuration object. This worked well for us. We use Hibernate to generate the schema (sql scripts) and they correctly contained the added columns.

Now we are moving to the latest Hibernate 5 release and it seems the Configuration object is essentially deprecated. The integrate call now gets a Metadata object rather than a Configuration object. What is the best way to implement our audit table extensions with the latest Hibernate version?

BTW in addition to extending the audit tables we also create archive tables which are used to migrate records from the audit tables. These tables were also added during the addDocument() intercept and again worked well for us.

Any help/direction would be most appreciated!

Thanks.

Unfortunately, there isn't a good way to implement what you were able to do in Hibernate 4. In 5.x, Envers now contributes a ServiceLoader implementation of org.hibernate.boot.spi.AdditionalJaxbMappingProducer that basically provides ORM with a collection of MappingDocument(s) which it uses as part of org.hibernate.boot.model.process.spi.MetadataBuildingProcess.

I would like to understand what are the additional columns you're adding and their purpose?
Are you using them as part of custom event listeners?

We solved the integration issue by providing a hook directly in AdditionalJaxbMappingProducer - not ideal but it works.

The additional fields are actually related to archiving. We also produce a mapping for an archive table related to the original entity - very similar to what envers does in creating an audit table.