Without any proper tool that can guide us in looking for correct properties, it will become very hard to correctly configure our application. This is when Hibernate Tools Eclipse Plugin comes handy and a must have plugin for hibernate projects.
Hibernate Tools
Today we will look into installing hibernate tools in Eclipse and how to use it for generating Hibernate mapping and configuration xml files.
Hibernate Tools Eclipse Plugin Installation
Installing Hibernate Tools eclipse plugin requires following steps.
- Go to “Eclipse Marketplace” from the Help Menu, as shown in below image.
- Use the search option to find the “Hibernate Tools” plugin, hibernate plugins are Eclipse version specific. So make sure you choose the same one as your eclipse. You can find Eclipse version from “About Eclipse” popup page.
- Click on the install button, make sure the “Hibernate Tools” check box is selected and follow the instructions to install.
- Once the plugin is installed, it will ask to restart the Eclipse. Just restart it and you are ready to use it for hibernate projects.
Generating Hibernate Mapping File using Hibernate Tools Eclipse Plugin
Now that Hibernate Tools Plugin is installed, let’s see how to generate Hibernate Mapping XML file using it.
For my example, I have created a simple Java Bean in one of my example projects.
Customer.java
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package com.journaldev.hibernate.model; public class Customer { private int id; private String name; public int getId() { return id; } public void setId(int id) { this.id = id; } public String getName() { return name; } public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; } } |
Now let’s see how we can easily generate Hibernate Mapping file using hibernate tools plugin.
- Select the project and go to “New” -> “Other” or you can open this window using keyboard Command+N (Mac), Ctrl+N (Windows). In the popup window, select “Hibernate XML Mapping File” as shown in below image.
- When you will click Next button, a new popup will come to add Classes, packages etc. Use it to add above Customer class.
- When you will click Finish button, a new file will get added in the same package where your java bean is present. For our Customer class, file name will be
Customer.hbm.xml. Below is the content of the auto generated file.Customer.hbm.xml
1234567891011121314151617<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE hibernate-mapping PUBLIC "-//Hibernate/Hibernate Mapping DTD 3.0//EN""https://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-mapping-3.0.dtd"><!-- Generated May 18, 2014 12:31:51 AM by Hibernate Tools 3.4.0.CR1 --><hibernate-mapping><class name="com.journaldev.hibernate.model.Customer" table="CUSTOMER"><id name="id" type="int"><column name="ID" /><generator class="assigned" /></id><property name="name" type="java.lang.String"><column name="NAME" /></property></class></hibernate-mapping> - Note that the hibernate tool points to old DTD location from SourceForge, you should change is to use from hibernate official website.
12345<!DOCTYPE hibernate-configuration PUBLIC"-//Hibernate/Hibernate Configuration DTD 3.0//EN""https://hibernate.org/dtd/hibernate-configuration-3.0.dtd"> - The major benefit of using Hibernate tool is the content assist when we want to change something in the hibernate mapping file, as shown in the below image.
Generating Hibernate Configuration File using Hibernate Tools Eclipse Plugin
Hibernate Configuration XML file contains properties used to configure Database settings, connection pool settings etc. We can use Hibernate Tools plugin to generate the basic hibernate configuration xml file and then use it’s content assist to add additional properties.
- Select the project and go to “New” -> “Other” or you can open this window using keyboard Command+N (Mac), Ctrl+N (Windows). In the popup window, select “Hibernate Configuration File” as shown in below image.
- In the next window, you can select the file location and set the file name, as shown below.
- The next window lets you set the database properties such as dialect, database user, password and connection URLs.
- When you click on Finish button, below file will get generated.
hibernate.cfg.xml
123456789101112131415<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!DOCTYPE hibernate-configuration PUBLIC"-//Hibernate/Hibernate Configuration DTD 3.0//EN""https://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-configuration-3.0.dtd"><hibernate-configuration><session-factory><property name="hibernate.connection.driver_class">com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</property><property name="hibernate.connection.password">pankaj123</property><property name="hibernate.connection.url">jdbc:mysql://localhost/TestDB</property><property name="hibernate.connection.username">pankaj</property><property name="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect</property></session-factory></hibernate-configuration>
Note that again the DTD is pointing to SourceForge and you should change it to point to Hibernate official DTD location, as specified above. - Again the major benefit of using hibernate tools is the content assist that comes with it, as shown in the below image.
Because of content assist, we can easily find out the properties that we are looking for, rather than going through a lot of documentations or online resource. This saves a lot of development time and helps us in configuring our application easily.
That’s all for using hibernate tools eclipse plugin, I use it for all my hibernate projects and it saves a lot of time every single day.