Question

I have a pretty complex database schema and would like to know if there are any tools which I can use to auto-generate the entities if I am using Hibernate as my persistence mechanism.

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you’re looking for database “schema generation” (ie automatically create your tables with PKs etc), try org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaExport, as I said in this SO question.

Use it like this:

AnnotationConfiguration conf = (new AnnotationConfiguration()).configure();
new SchemaExport(conf).create(showHql, run);

(check the link above for more info)

However, if you’re looking for auto-generation of Hibernate mapping files (*.hbm.xml) or annotations, you should look into Hibernate Tools, as stated below.