[hibernate-issues] [Hibernate-JIRA] Commented: (HHH-5798) Is it really necessary to explicitly specifiy discriminatorValue for abstract classes?

Is it really necessary to explicitly specifiy discriminatorValue for abstract classes? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Key: HHH-5798 URL: http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HHH-5798 Project: Hibernate Core Issue Type: Improvement Components: entity-manager Affects Versions: 3.6.0 Reporter: Oleksandr Alesinskyy At the time being if the SINGLE_TABLE inheritance strategy is used, the discriminator type is set to char and some abstract classes in the hierarchy do not have an explicit discriminator value specified the following error occurs: {quote} Caused by: org.hibernate.AnnotationException: Using default @DiscriminatorValue for a discriminator of type CHAR is not safe at org.hibernate.cfg.annotations.EntityBinder.bindDiscriminatorValue(EntityBinder.java:373) at org.hibernate.cfg.annotations.EntityBinder.bindEntity(EntityBinder.java:200) at org.hibernate.cfg.AnnotationBinder.bindClass(AnnotationBinder.java:586) at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration$MetadataSourceQueue.processAnnotatedClassesQueue(Configuration.java:3977) at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration$MetadataSourceQueue.processMetadata(Configuration.java:3931) at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.secondPassCompile(Configuration.java:1368) at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.buildMappings(Configuration.java:1345) at org.hibernate.ejb.Ejb3Configuration.buildMappings(Ejb3Configuration.java:1477) at org.hibernate.ejb.EventListenerConfigurator.configure(EventListenerConfigurator.java:193) at org.hibernate.ejb.Ejb3Configuration.configure(Ejb3Configuration.java:1096) at org.hibernate.ejb.Ejb3Configuration.configure(Ejb3Configuration.java:685) at org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence.createContainerEntityManagerFactory(HibernatePersistence.java:73) {quote} At the same time it is clear that no one row in the corresponding table may represent the abstract class, so it is absolutely safe to completely ignore abstract classes when decision is made which class is represented by a row.