Field Name Best Practices (Shadowing or Compund Names)

Question

As the red block above (warning that this is a subjective question and may be closed) there may not be a stone etched law on this, but I don't see why that would warrant closing a question.

...Rant aside

I am planning on implementing Hibernate as my persistence framework, which may fix my problem upon implementation, but I have DB tables that translate into class and sub-class (many specifics and complications that exist in real life are omitted :) ):

//dbo.a with column Name
class a {
  public String Name;
}

//dbo.b with column Name and a foreign key to dbo.a
class b extends a {
  public String Name;
}

So, for the what should be done and why:

Shadowing:
I could leave these as is, which would require some reflection cleverness (per http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5419973 ), when working with objects whose types are unknown at compile.

Compound Names:
I could name all of my fields preceded by its class's name i.e. a.aName and b.bName, which gets really ugly in real life: Door.DoorName and RotatingDoor.RotatingDoorName

Getters and Setters:
I didn't mention this one, since with JavaBeans these will be derived from the field names, and I believe Hibernate uses annotated POJOs.

To influence the results a little, shadowing seems to be the most robust, at least in my case where class a extends an abstract class with Name defined, then b shadows with its own Name when applicable. Using compound names would mean that if I wanted to add a NickName column to all my DB tables then I would have to add that field to each type (and then what's the point of inheritance?!)

In the end I decided to find out what people, hopefully who have experienced pros/cons of an implementation of one or more of these technique, have to say on the issue; or that convenient stone etched best practice will do :)

-Nomad311

Answer 1

you should only define your member in the base class if you need it in all subclasses. hibernate offers various types of mappings for class trees. take a look at Inheritance mapping in the manual to get a feeling of it.

you can define your mapping either via an xml file or via annotations.