Installing Hibernate Spatial

You will need to have the following libraries in your classpath: hibernate, a JDBC driver and hibernate-spatial.jar, plus all transitive dependencies.

Geographic objects (or features) are characterized by having a geometry attribute: an attribute that describes the location and geometry of the object by means of a set of coordinates. Hibernate Spatial uses the Geometry package of the Java Topology Suite to represent the geometries in Java.

Configuring a spatial dialect

If you want to use the geographic data support, you will need to configure Hibernate with the appropriate Spatial Dialect. For example, to use the postgis spatial data support in Postgresql, you need to add the following line in your hibernate.cfg.xml.

                ...
                <property name="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.spatial.dialect.postgis.PostgisDialect</property>
                ...
            

The property value is here the class name of the dialect that extends the Hibernate Postgresql dialect to include support for spatial data.

Mapping Geometries

Geographic objects can now be represented in Java by means of POJO's that have a Geometry-valued property. Since we use the Java Topology Suite to represent geometries, this looks like:

                import com.vividsolutions.jts.geom.Geometry;
                ...
                public Class SomeGeographicClass {
                ...
                private Geometry geometry;
                ...
                public Geometry getGeometry(){
                return this.geom;
                }

                public void setGeometry(Geometry geometry){
                this.geometry = geometry;
                }
                ...
                }
            

The geometry property can be mapped by Hibernate by means of the special type org.hibernatespatial.GeometryUserType, like this

                ...
                <property name="geometry" type="org.hibernate.spatial.GeometryType">
                <column name="geom" />
                </property>
                ...
            

Working with geographic data (geometry-valued properties) is now exactly the same as working with any other Hibernate-supported type.

Installing Hibernate Spatial

You will need to have the following libraries in your classpath: hibernate (plus its dependencies), a JDBC driver for you database, hibernate-spatial.jar and the appropriate spatial dialect provider for your database, and finally the Java Topology Suite (jts.jar). Depending on the database that you use, you might also need some helper libraries for that provide geographic data support for the JDBC driver. Consult the dialect provider documentation for more information about this.

Hibernate-spatial.jar provides the generic extension mechanism for working with geographic data; the dialect providers contribute the database-specific parts.

Geographic objects (or features) are characterized by having a geometry attribute: an attribute that describes the location and geometry of the object by means of a set of coordinates. Hibernate Spatial uses the Geometry package of the Java Topology Suite to represent the geometries in Java.

Configuring a spatial dialect

If you want to use the geographic data support, you will need to configure Hibernate with the appropriate Spatial Dialect. For example, to use the postgis spatial data support in Postgresql, you need to add the following line in your hibernate.cfg.xml.

                ...
                <property name="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernatespatial.postgis.PostgisDialect</property>
                ...
            

The property value is here the class name of the dialect that extends the Hibernate Postgresql dialect to include support for spatial data.

Mapping Geometries

Geographic objects can now be represented in Java by means of POJO's that have a Geometry-valued property. Since we use the Java Topology Suite to represent geometries, this looks like:

                import com.vividsolutions.jts.geom.Geometry;
                ...
                public Class SomeGeographicClass {
                ...
                private Geometry geometry;
                ...
                public Geometry getGeometry(){
                return this.geom;
                }

                public void setGeometry(Geometry geometry){
                this.geometry = geometry;
                }
                ...
                }
            

The geometry property can be mapped by Hibernate by means of the special type org.hibernatespatial.GeometryUserType, like this

                ...
                <property name="geometry" type="org.hibernatespatial.GeometryUserType">
                <column name="geom" />
                </property>
                ...
            

Working with geographic data (geometry-valued properties) is now exactly the same as working with any other Hibernate-supported type.