Using interfaces instead of classes as entyties ------------------------------------------------ Key: HHH-2416 URL: http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HHH-2416 Project: Hibernate3 Type: Improvement Components: core Environment: Hibernate Reporter: Pedro da Silva Garcia Priority: Minor Hi folks, I'm writing to express some of my ideas for a better ORM framework. First i think it would be very nice to be able to map the tables to an interface instead of to a class. This would give me the ability to have many different classes implementing the same interface. For example: If I have a project that uses Struts 1. I would be able to use a form beam as a value object to persist data. But this is just the begging of what I am thinking about. The good this would be when a retrieve data from the database. Example: Instead of doing this 1) session.get(Cat.class, id); It would be great to do something like this 2) session.get(CatForm.class, ICat.class, id); and to do this 3) session.get (ICat.class, id); In this last case Hibernate would have to generate a class that implements ICat and return it (Kind like what Tapestry framework does with the page object). In real life I would use the example number 2 in situations like this: public class CatDAO { public ICat get(Integer id, Class<ICat> returnType){ return (ICat)session.get(returnType, ICat.class, id); } ... } And with the interfaces I would be able to merge entyties like public class EmployeeDepartment implements IEmployee, IDepartment{ private Integer employeeId; private Integer departmentId; } Or I could create a class to use as a query with the union of different tables. And in the case of complex forms with data form many different tables I simply would create a form class that implements all those different interfaces and when I do a save, all of the different entyties represented by this class would be saved. Thanks for your attention, Pedro -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. - If you think it was sent incorrectly contact one of the administrators: http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/secure/Administrators.... - For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira