Hibernate: how to retreive only few properties in a class

From:
Rami <rzeira@comcast.net>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.databases
Date:
Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:01:58 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<be47a425-7b6b-4123-b81b-96e2de4acefe@e34g2000vbm.googlegroups.com>
Hi all,

I'm new to Hibernate and still wondering how to do things. I declared
a class in hibernate. This class has many properties; many of which
are long. Now, I need to retrieve a list of this class but I need only
few properties from each; kind of a summary. Is it possible to do so
by using the original class or do I need to create a summary class?

Here is an example to what I mean:

Here is the entity:
public class Employee
{
    private long employeeId;
    private String employeeName;
    private String ssnNumber;
    private String loginName;
    private String password;

    public Employee()
    {
        employeeId = 0L;
        employeeName = "";
        ssnNumber = "";

    }

    public long getEmployeeId()
    {
        return employeeId;
    }

    public void setEmployeeId(long employeeId)
    {
        this.employeeId = employeeId;
    }

    public String getEmployeeName()
    {
        return employeeName;
    }

    public void setEmployeeName(String employeeName)
    {
        this.employeeName = employeeName;
    }

    public String getSsnNumber()
    {
        return ssnNumber;
    }

    public void setSsnNumber(String ssnNumber)
    {
        this.ssnNumber = ssnNumber;
    }

    public String getLoginName()
    {
        return loginName;
    }

    public void setLoginName(String loginName)
    {
        this.loginName = loginName;
    }

    public String getPassword()
    {
        return password;
    }

    public void setPassword(String password)
    {
        this.password = password;
    }

}

Here is to corresponding employee.hbm.xml:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE hibernate-mapping PUBLIC
    "-//Hibernate/Hibernate Mapping DTD//EN"
    "http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-mapping-3.0.dtd">
<hibernate-mapping>
    <class name="entities.Employee" table="Employees">
        <id name="employeeId" column="EmployeeId">
            <generator class="increment"/>
        </id>

        <property name="employeeName" column="EmployeeName"/>
        <property name="ssnNumber" column="SsnNumber"/>
        <property name="loginName" column="LoginName"/>
        <property name="password" column="Password"/>
    </class>

    <sql-query name="getEmployeesSummaryList">
    <return alias="employee" class="entities.Employee" />
    select EmployeeId, EmployeeName, SsnNumber from Employees
    </sql-query>

</hibernate-mapping>

Note the "getEmployeesSummaryList" and the return employee clause.
When I do so, I get a java.sql.SQLException: Column 'LoginName' not
found exception. My guess is that Hibernate tries to map every column
to its corresponding property and when it cannot find some of the
columns it throws an exception. One solution would be to create
another entity -- EmployeeSummary -- but this will be the wrong thing
to do because of two reasons: (1) it has no place in the domain model
and (2) if things are changing, I'll have to make the modification in
more than one place. The best solution would be to tell Hibernate to
ignore columns it cannot find in the ResultSet. Is there a way to tell
Hibernate to map only the columns found in the ResultSet?

Thanks

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