[hibernate-dev] Using hibernate with UDFs

[richard at bowmansystems.com]

Most modern databases support user defined functions that return tables.  We use them with both MS-SQL Server and Postgres to implement a rather complex/convoluted security scheme in the database.  Thus instead of doing this:

SELECT * FROM clients

we do this:

SELECT * FROM secure_clients( <user_id> )

Where <user_id> would be the ID of the user who is querying the client table.  The "user" is not a database user but rather an application user, who in turn has a record in the users table.  Based on the contents of the user table and various security tables we can determine what "clients" the user can "see" and only return those.  This allows the application programmer to ignore the implementation of SELECT security and allows other apps that may touch the same database such as import/export utilities and business intelligence tools to all use the same security logic.

The fun part with hibernate will be the parameters to the UDFs.  They will need to be session specific.  My initial though was to add some mechanism to allow properties to be assigned to the session, IE:

session.setProperty("user_id", "1");

Then in the mapping:
<class table="secure_clients(#user_id#)" name="...">

Then when hibernate pulls from secure_clients it could do a simple string replace based on the session properties.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Max Rydahl Andersen" <max.andersen at redhat.com>
To: richard at bowmansystems.com, hibernate-dev at lists.jboss.org
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 11:11:41 AM (GMT-0500) America/New_York
Subject: Re: [hibernate-dev] Using hibernate with UDFs

haven't heard about anyone working on this.

With UDF I guess you mean user defined functions and on SQL Server or ?

Have you tried just using the UDF as table name directly ?

/max

> I asked in the forums a while back about using Hibernate to tie back to  
> set-returning UDFs instead of a table or a view.
>
> http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=980650&highlight=
>
> I have looked at Hibernate alternatives solutions and they all come up  
> short in some way.  I'm interested in hacking Hibernate to add support  
> for tying back to UDFs at this point.  I was just curious if this was  
> something anyone else had looked at in the past, was on someone's TODO  
> list, was something there are strong feelings about, etc before I got  
> started.
>
> Thanks
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> hibernate-dev mailing list
> hibernate-dev at lists.jboss.org
> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/hibernate-dev



-- 
--
Max Rydahl Andersen
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Hibernate
max at hibernate.org
http://hibernate.org

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max.andersen at jboss.com