Creating views through hibernate

Question

Is there any way to create a view when creating tables by using the hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto property. I am using annotation type for defining the table and its fields. Is there any property that I can use to create the view also through hibernate?

Answer 1

Hibernate does not do that for you automatically. However, one of these solutions might be useful to you:

1. Create a view in your database, and define a model with those columns using hibernate. Hibernate does not create a table for that model, if it finds this view. And the rest is just like using a real table.

2. Hibernate does give you the ability to create (and drop) additional database objects yourself in the XML mapping files. Something like this.

   <database-object>
      <create>create or replace view yourView</create>
      <drop>drop view yourView</drop>
      <dialect-scope name='org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle9Dialect' />
   </database-object>
   

In my opinion the first solutions is way easier to handle, as I am currently using this method to treat my views.

Answer 2

Another option is to put the view creation sql in a script that is run by hbm2ddl by configuring property

hibernate.hbm2ddl.import_files

Assuming that you have an entity that represents that view, you must do a drop table before creating the view, since hbm2ddl will create a table if it doesn't find an existing view by that name.