The main purpose of this chapter is to tell you about Seam Generate Entities.
Generate Entities is available directly from within Eclipse using Hibernate Tools plugin for the standard seam-gen generation.
Generate Entities generates a set of CRUD Seam components and web pages based on existing tables in a database or on existing entities in your application.
In the Generate Seam Entities wizard there are two generation modes: Reverse Engineer from database and Use existing entities.
The Reverse Engineer from database mode can be described in four steps:
The wizard gets in database, extracts the tables and their connections
On basis of this metainfomation the Entity classes are generated into org.domain.project.entity package
For the entities from step 2 the classes EntityList and EntityHome are generated into org.domain.project.session package
The xhtml pages are generated.
Checking the Use existing entities mode the wizard executes only 3 and 4 steps. It generates missing classes and xhtml pages.
Read the Generate a CRUD Database Application chapter in order to see how the Generate Seam Entities wizard can be used.