Trick to help maintenance of HQL query. --------------------------------------- Key: HBX-716 URL: http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HBX-716 Project: Hibernate Tools Issue Type: Patch Components: hbm2java Affects Versions: 3.2beta6 Reporter: Francois Jean Priority: Minor Attachments: patch.txt I'm just sending a modification I made to a FreeMarket template in Hibernate Tools (hbm2java) to help us maintaining our HQL. We are using a large database with more the 300 tables and we often do a reverse-engineering of the database to keep our Java entities in synch and sometimes we have to deal with column names change. After the reverse-engineering process, the compiler will show errors for all the getter/setter that have change name. But it will not show any errors in HQL using "old" attribute names. For example if we have a table "Application" with a column "Version_num", we would get a Class "Application" with an attribute "versionNum" and its own getter and setter. If the column "Version_num" change its name for "App_version_num", the new attribute name will be "appVersionNum" with its new getter/setter. And the compiler will show errors for old code using the getter "getVersionNum". But will not show any errors for HQL like: "from " +Application.class.getName() + " where versionNum = 3" Solution: We modify the generation of the entity to include a constant string for each attribute name, by using these constants the compiler can flag error in HQL. The new HQL would be: "from " +Application.class.getName() + " where "+ Application.VERSIONNUM + " = 3" For now, we always generate these constants but it could be possible to trigger the constants generation by using a parameter in the ant task when asking Hibernate Tools to generate Java entities. Template that was modified: PojoFields.ftl // Fields name constant <#foreach field in pojo.getAllPropertiesIterator()><#if pojo.getMetaAttribAsBool(field, "gen-property", true)> public static final String ${field.name?upper_case} = "${field.name}"; </#if> </#foreach> // Fields <#foreach field in pojo.getAllPropertiesIterator()><#if pojo.getMetaAttribAsBool(field, "gen-property", true)> <#if pojo.hasMetaAttribute(field, "field-description")> /** ${pojo.getFieldJavaDoc(field, 0)} */ </#if> ${pojo.getFieldModifiers(field)} ${pojo.getJavaTypeName(field, jdk5)} ${field.name}<#if pojo.hasFieldInitializor(field, jdk5)> = ${pojo.getFieldInitialization(field, jdk5)}</#if>; </#if> </#foreach> PS: This solution is not perfect, a better approach would be something that would also validate at compilation time the type of association. For example, the association "person.address.city" present in a HQL statement will only be validated when this HQL will be executed. François J.