Hibernate Entity Generation Using Ant

Why would someone like to generate the sources from ant if its very easily generated through the IDE. The answer is simple: In a development environment different developers will use different versions of eclipse which will result in slightly different entities being generated. To provide the consistency across the team its better to have a ant or maven to generate the sources rather than rely on ide tools configuration.

Its very simple to generate the sources from ant's build.xml.

lets go through step by step

Build.xml is the file that the Ant uses to build the project. It has different tasks which we can use to perform different actions like compile, making jars, making wars, deployment etc. We will be using build.xml to generate sources. Hibernate tools comes with a predefined task which is org.hibernate.tool.ant.HibernateToolTask which is present in hibernate tools jar. We will be using this task to generate the sources.

1 Write a hibernate configuration file (a xml file.) which provides with all the details which the hibernate will require to connect to database. Hibernate will require
Username: username of the database
Password: password of the database
Schema: The name of the schema of the database
Driver: The driver to the database. For oracle its oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver
Connection Url: The connection url with portnumber, protocol and hostname.
Dialect: The dialect. For oracle 10 with hibernate its org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle10gDialect

At the end it will look like below.
oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver
development

username
password
org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle10gDialect


2 Write a reveng file which is an xml file which says which table metadata to be taken and converted to source.
For example:



3 Create a strategy class for the generation of classes. This strategy class will define the template for the source file generated. We will define this file to customize our class generation. We use HibernateCustomStrategy for our strategy. By default Hibernate tools provides with its own implementation.
4 Create a build.xml with the target. The class name mentions which class to be evoked when running this task. We will be using the predefined class HibernateToolTask which is present in the hibernate-tools.jar. Class path ref is the reference to the class path. For example
Create a path element. This element says that all the jar files in the lib directory will be part of this path.








We will refer this path element in the classpathref like below.






in ant task to generate the xml mapping files and uncomment to generate the DAOs.
11 To run this build.xml you can choose to use command line or through an IDE.
11.1 To run from the command line go to the directory of the build file. Use ant to run the build.xml. Note: You should have ANT_HOME set in your environment variable.
11.2 To run from Eclipse. Change the view to ant view. And double click on the targetname.
12 Check in the for the generated source.