Question

I’d like to provide the ability to completely wipe my webapp’s database from its GUI, rebuilding the tables with the auto-generated DDL gleaned from an AnnotationConfiguration.

At the moment I do this by programatically setting hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto to create and then creating a new SessionFactory.

AnnotationConfiguration cfg = new AnnotationConfiguration();
if (nukeDB)
    cfg.setProperty("hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto", "create");
for (Class<?> clas : HibernateMappedClasses) {
    cfg.addAnnotatedClass(clas);
}
return cfg.buildSessionFactory();

but this requires creating a fresh AnnotationConfiguration from the one that Spring is building for the rest of the app.

Can I use my existing SessionFactory to recreate the database schema?

Answer 1

This isn’t simple in raw Hibernate, but given that I’m using Spring, it turns out that the LocalSessionFactoryBean has methods dropDatabaseSchema and createDatabaseSchema that together do the trick.

Without Spring I think I’d copy the code in those methods!