Declaring a class as an entity and creating a table in the database – @Entity and @Table

We need a class to be declared as an entity for hibernate to use it. Hibernate considers the class as a persistent class if it is annotated with the @Entity annotation.

How to do it…

Perform the following steps to declare a class as a hibernate entity:

1. Enter the following code on your editor:

   @Entity
   public class Employee {
     // Fields and getter/setter
   }

   Here, we annotate a class, Employee, with the @Entity annotation. As a result, hibernate considers the current class eligible to be persisted.

   Note

   If you build a session factory with the preceding code and the table name is not given, hibernate will create a table with the name employee, which is equal to the class name.

2. If we want a user-defined table name rather than a default name, we can use the @Table annotation. The following code shows us how to achieve this:

   @Entity
   @Table(name="tbl_employee")
   public class Employee {
     // Fields and getter/setter
   ...