Cryptic Hibernate Reverse Engineering Wizard Error

Today I tried to create some POJOs / HBM files automatically from a legacy database using the Netbeans 6.8 Hibernate tools. Everything was going great before and I could connect to the database using my hibernate.cfg.xml file in the actual code but then I ran the “Hibernate Reverse Engineering Wizard”…

Problem #1: It could not find my hibernate.cfg.xml and I had to copy this file into my actual package directory where I was trying to generate the files.

Problem #2: Okay the hibernate.cfg.xml was now read but a new error showed up “Database drivers are not added to the project classpath. Go to project properties to add database library.”

After some digging around I finally figured out that the error is somewhat cryptic. The Microsoft SQL Server JDBC 4 library was actually in the path but the real problem was the connection string and the lack of specifying a connection driver class.


Previously I had:

name="hibernate.connection.url">
jdbc:sqlserver://MY_SERVER:1433

This had to be changed to:

com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver
jdbc:sqlserver://MY_SERVER:1433;databaseName=MY_DATABASE


Now the wizard did not error out any-more, success!


Problem #3: While the wizard no longer errored out it also did not show a list of available tables, no matter though it did generate a very generic hibernate.reveng.xml file. The “New Hibernate Mapping Files and POJOs From Database” wizard accepted this file and created POJOs / HBM for every single table in the database. The only issue here was that I had to manually delete the default sys. schema tables which were of no use to me.