[Hibernate] Tools

[Henri Tremblay]

Hello,   At job we have decided to convert our application to Hibernate to solve some persistence issues that were previously done by hand (caching, lazy loading, outter-join and so on).   An existing application is not really easy to convert but it's going pretty well. The first thing that was missing was to be able to create hbm.xml files. I tried class2hbm (and improved it a little) but it wasn't enough. So on my free time I've started a HbmGenerator that creates a hbm.xml file from the class, table and a field mapping between both. It currently goes pretty well. I can map normal fields, user types (that we use a lot) and tonigh I'll try to add associations. So I thought you might be interested to see this app (and possibly add it to the hibernate tool set). What do you think?   On side of that, I'm also working on hibern8ide. My first improvement was to be able to save the configuration so that each time you reopen it you don't have to reload everything anymore. My next idea is to add auto-completion for the queries and to have real file management. Same question, do you want my collaboration on that?   Lastly, I have a suggestion. It's about a problem I had today. In all our tables, we have a creation_date and an updating_date field. One is filled with sysdate when the insert is done and the other is filled with sysdate each time the record is updated. This is harcoded in the sql insert and update call. The java code never sees that. The problem is that it wasn't possible to do so with hibernate. We had to add a getCreatingDate() and so in our business object base class to handle this. Instead, what I would have like is to be able to do something like:   <property column="creation_date" value="sysdate"/>   So to be able to hardcode a value in the sql call. But perhaps you have a better idea?   Thanks and happy new year (yeah... I still ain't had the time to tell everyone...), Henri