Hibernate Naming Strategies

Using Hibernate annotations with the default naming strategy leaves you with camelCasedColumnNames in your database schema.

Gavin King provided a good camelCase to underscore_separated naming strategy with org.hibernate.cfg.ImprovedNamingStrategy. The only glitch I found was in foreign key references. I’ve always seen the naming convention of ${tablename}_id, but ImprovedNamingStrategy just called the column the same name as any other field. That’s easily overridden in a subclass:

public class NewAndImprovedNamingStrategy extends ImprovedNamingStrategy {
    @Override
    public String foreignKeyColumnName(String propertyName, String propertyEntityName, String propertyTableName, String referencedColumnName) {
        String s = super.foreignKeyColumnName(propertyName, propertyEntityName, propertyTableName, referencedColumnName);
        return s.endsWith("_id") ? s : s + "_id";
    }
}

If you’re using Spring, wire it up to your SessionFactoryBean:

  <bean id="namingStrategy" class="...NewAndImprovedNamingStrategy"/>
  ...
  <bean id="sessionFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean">
    <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"/>
    <property name="namingStrategy" ref="namingStrategy"/>
    ...

And you’ll be freed from doing boilerplate “name=” attributes in your domain POJOs.

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