Hibernate Tips is a series of posts in which I describe a quick and easy solution for common Hibernate questions. Some of the most popular tips are also available as a book.

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Question:

How can I map a read-only database view with Hibernate?

Solution:

Database views, in general, are mapped in the same way as database tables. You just have to define an entity that maps the view with the specific name and one or more of its columns.

But the normal table mapping is not read-only, and you can use the entity to change its content.

Depending on the database you use and the definition of the view, you’re not allowed to perform an update on the view content. You should therefore also prevent Hibernate from updating it.

You can easily achieve this with the Hibernate-specific @Immutable annotation which I use in the following code snippet.

@Entity
@Immutable
public class BookView {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
    private Long id;

  @Version
    private int version;

    private String title;

    @Temporal(TemporalType.DATE)
    private Date publishingDate;

    private String authors;

    ...

}

The @Immutable annotation tells Hibernate to ignore all changes on this entity, but you can use it in your queries to read data from your database.

List<BookView> bvs = em.createQuery("SELECT v FROM BookView v", BookView.class).getResultList();

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