As mentioned previously, Hibernate will first attempt to resolve DTDs in its classpath. The manner in which it does this is by registering a custom org.xml.sax.EntityResolver implementation with the SAXReader it uses to read in the xml files. This custom EntityResolver recognizes two different systemId namespaces.
a hibernate namespace is recognized whenever the resolver encounteres a systemId starting with http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/; the resolver attempts to resolve these entities via the classlaoder which loaded the Hibernate classes.
a user namespace is recognized whenever the resolver encounteres a systemId using a classpath:// URL protocol; the resolver will attempt to resolve these entities via (1) the current thread context classloader and (2) the classloader which loaded the Hibernate classes.
An example of utilizing user namespacing:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE hibernate-mapping PUBLIC
"-//Hibernate/Hibernate Mapping DTD 3.0//EN"
"http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-mapping-3.0.dtd" [
<!ENTITY types SYSTEM "classpath://your/domain/types.xml">
]>
<hibernate-mapping package="your.domain">
<class name="MyEntity">
<id name="id" type="my-custom-id-type">
...
</id>
</class>
&types
</hibernate-mapping>
Where types.xml is a resource in the your.domain package and contains a custom Section 5.2.3, “Custom value types” typedef.