Hibernate supports the three basic inheritance mapping strategies:
1. table per class hierarchy
2. table per subclass
3. table per concrete class
In addition, Hibernate supports a fourth, slightly different kind of polymorphism:
implicit polymorphism:
It is possible to use different mapping strategies for different branches of the same inheritance hierarchy. You can then make use of implicit polymorphism to achieve polymorphism across the whole hierarchy. However, Hibernate does not support mixing <subclass>, <joined-subclass> and <union-subclass> mappings under the same root <class> element. It is possible to mix together the table per hierarchy and table per subclass strategies under the the same <class> element, by combining the <subclass> and <join> elements (see below for an example).
It is possible to define subclass, union-subclass, and joined-subclass mappings in separate mapping documents directly beneath hibernate-mapping. This allows you to extend a class hierarchy by adding a new mapping file. You must specify an extends attribute in the subclass mapping, naming a previously mapped superclass. Previously this feature made the ordering of the mapping documents important. Since Hibernate3, the ordering of mapping files is irrelevant when using the extends keyword. The ordering inside a single mapping file still needs to be defined as superclasses before subclasses.
<hibernate-mapping>
<subclass name="DomesticStudetn" extends="Student" discriminator-value="D">
<property name="name" type="string"/>
</subclass>
</hibernate-mapping>