Hi Gail,
you are right. My problem was to have a database independent solution to allow paging in a large result set with a large column (CLOB). So I needed a formula annotion that provides the shortened content of the column on all supported databases. As there is no way to create a dialect specific formula annotation I had to solve it using the database-object xml entity that can be dialect specific.
But regarding database independent usage: doesn't your solution add another problem to the goal of database independent hql queries? Maybe I am the only one who needs this
Best regards,
Carsten