Re: [hibernate-dev] Separating javax.persistence.AccessType and org.hibernate.property.PropertyAccessor

Historically annotation binding within Hibernate made a huge assumption that AccessType and PropertyAccessor were the same thing. They aren't necessarily. AccessType is simply meant to dictate where to look for annotations relating to "persistent attributes". PropertyAccessor is Hibernate's way of accessing property values (getting/setting) at runtime. Granted, AccessType *by default* should indicate the PropertyAccessor to use. I am not arguing that. I am just suggesting that we should keep both as distinct values. At the moment we collapse them into a single String (we dump AccessType and keep "PropertyAccessor name"). The trouble is that later on we sometimes need to know the AccessType, at which point we are forced to make a guess by interpreting the PropertyAccessor in use and hoping that a custom PropertyAccessor was not supplied.