hibernate console in intellij idea 9

I was pleasantly surprised to find better hibernate support in intellij idea 9, which was recently released.

They had hibernate support in 8.x, including a console, where you could run queries against your data using the mappings you had configured. However in version 9, they added the ability to use named parameters with associated values. So in essence, you can paste in a hql query and it autodetects the named parameters, e.g. :username. That pops up on the right pane as a named paraemeter. You just double click that, set its value, and you can run the query.

intellij has had support for this in their jdbc console in the past, but it's very handy now with the hibernate console. It removes one step from having to debug queries - you no longer have to use just the sql output that hibernate outputs and then piece queries back together and then try to guess where the disconnect was :).

See intellij feature request:
http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/IDEADEV-41129

Related to hibernate console, don't forget to have the ehcache.jar in your module's classpath if you want to use the hibernate console. You can find the jar in the basic core download of hibernate - in the lib/optional/ehcache directory of the bundle. The console requires the secondary cache and will give you odd secondary cache errors if you don't have it in the path.

See this about loading ehcache:
http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/IDEA-21914