Auto Generating Hibernate Entities

Question

Hi, I have a pretty complex database schema and would like to know if there are any tools which I can use to auto-generate the entities if I am using Hibernate as my persistence mechanism.

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you're looking for database "schema generation" (ie automatically create your tables with PKs etc), try org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaExport, as I said in this SO question.

Use it like this:

AnnotationConfiguration conf = (new AnnotationConfiguration()).configure();
new SchemaExport(conf).create(showHql, run);

(check the link above for more info)

However, if you're looking for auto-generation of Hibernate mapping files (*.hbm.xml) or annotations, you should look into Hibernate Tools, as stated below.

Answer 2

Here is an example from one of my build files:

<taskdef name="hibernatetool" 
   classname="org.hibernate.tool.ant.HibernateToolTask" 
   classpathref="toolslib" />

...

<target name="generate-ddl-script" depends="build">
 <hibernatetool>
  <annotationconfiguration configurationfile="${hibernate.cfg}" />
  <hbm2ddl export="false"
     update="false"
     drop="true"
     create="true"
     destdir="${scripts.dir}"
     outputfilename="create-tables.ddl" />
 </hibernatetool>
</target>