[Hibernate] support for dynabeans

[Christoph S. <ch...@sc...>]

Hi All!

I'd like to implement a new feature in Hibernate, but I dont know how to 
start best. I would like to be able to map classes that dont really 
exist as javaclass, but use a dynabean instead 
http://www.apache.org/~jvanzyl/jakarta-commons/beanutils/apidocs/org/apache/commons/beanutils/DynaBean.html
(or a map). All seems to be quite easy, refactor all stuff that loads 
and initializes a bean to a pluggable factory, and there if the loading 
of the class fails just create or initialize a Dynabean or Map (or maybe 
a HibernateGenericValueHolder) instead.

The only problem is:
The Hibernate API :)
Session.load, Session.update, etc all get a java.lang.Class Argument. Do 
you think it would be possible to add functions that get a classname as 
String instead?  Maybe the functions that take a string as argument 
should always use Holders instead of beans.
I realize that this would be big changes, but if you think that this 
would be a good idea, I would just go ahead and try to implement it.

 

The inspiration to this comes from the ofbiz entity engine, which always 
uses generic holders instead of Beans, which i dont really like, but its 
really nice for some usecases, e.g. letting your user add colums to a 
table at runtime without restarting the server. I recognize that i could 
dynamically generate a bean with bcel, but once that bean is loaded i 
cant add properties to it, so I'd really prefer a map.

regards
 chris