2.3. Reverse engineering a legacy database
Your first step when mapping a legacy database likely involves an automatic reverse-engineering procedure. After all, an entity schema already exists in your database system. To make this easier, Hibernate has a set of tools that can read a schema and produce various artifacts from this metadata, including XML mapping files and Java source code. All of this is template-based, so many customizations are possible.
You can control the reverse-engineering process with tools and tasks in your Ant build. The HibernateToolTask you used earlier to export SQL DDL from Hibernate mapping metadata has many more options, most of which are related to reverse engineering, as to how XML mapping files, Java code, or ...
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