How to write native SQL queries in Hibernate without hardcoding table names and fields?

Question

Sometimes you have to write some of your queries in native SQL rather than hibernate HQL. Is there a nice way to avoid hardcoding table names and fields and get this data from existing mapping?

For example instead of:

String sql = "select user_name from tbl_user where user_id = :id";

something like:

String sql = "select " + Hibernate.getFieldName("user.name") + " from " + Hibernate.getTableName(User.class) + " where " + Hibernate.getFieldName("user.id") + " = :id";

Answer 1

It is possible to get this information as shown below, but I am not sure that I would do this in production code unless I really need the table names to be changeable after the code has been compiled. Otherwise, is it really worth the readability cost to your code to have this?

AbstractEntityPersister metadata = 
    (AbstractEntityPersister) sessionFactory.getClassMetadata(User.class);
String tableName = metadata.getTableName();
String[] columnNames = metadata.getKeyColumnNames();