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Forum & Mailinglists > How To Ask For Help

How To Ask For Help

The Hibernate forum is very high traffic and a number of people spend literally hours each day reading and responding to questions. This is an extremely difficult job and no-one is paid for this work. So we ask that everyone show some consideration to the people who answer questions by taking the time to make their job easier.

Answering question is hard. Think about just how difficult it is to troubleshoot computing problems without access to sourcecode or debugger, and without even verbal interaction with the person who does. This is not how software development usually works! The person answering your questions is a fallible human being and is just as vulnerable to frustration and error as you are. Even more so, because they must work without the tools of their trade, resorting instead to speculation and guesswork.

Before posting

  • Try to resolve the problem yourself. It is much quicker for you to find out as much about your problem than to wait while someone on the other side of the world responds to your questions with more questions. Even if you can't quite solve the problem, at least you will have more information to give.
  • Use the Hibernate log. There is an enormous amount of information to be gleaned from the Hibernate log and you will learn a lot about how Hibernate works if you get familiar with it. Learning about the log messages will help you resolve future problems more quickly. See the FAQ for instructions on enabling logging.
  • Use your debugger. An amazingly huge number of problems can be solved incredibly quickly by just putting a break point in the right place. Hibernate is open source, so you can can put the Hibernate source in your IDE sourcepath and step into Hibernate code if necessary. Please don't post to the forum until you have tried this approach.
  • Isolate your problem. Always recreate the problem in a stripped down test case with just two or three classes with one or two properties before posting. If you isolate the problem, you will probably find the cause. If you can not, at least we will have a much better chance.
  • Read the FAQ. This is a no-brainer. Most forum questions are already answered in the FAQs.
  • Search the forum first! Nothing degrades the forum signal/noise ratio more than seeing the same questions over and over. Make sure that you are not asking a question that has already been asked and answered.

When posting

  • Give as much information as possible. Most of the forum posts do not give enough information, and we have to cobble together an answer out of half-guesses about what the user is doing. Give at least: the Hibernate version, your mapping documents, the Java code between sessionFactory.openSession() and session.close(), the full stack trace of any exception that occurs, and the name and version of the database you are using. A debug level Hibernate log excerpt is also appreciated (you have one already, right? you shouldn't be posting yet if you don't!).
  • Don't blame Hibernate. 99% of posts titled "bug in Hibernate" are simple user error. Don't allege a bug unless you really know Hibernate - it is very annoying to the person answering your post.
  • Don't insult Hibernate or the people who worked hard to develop it. You want an answer to your problem, right? Insulting people is a really bad way to get it. People will deliberately not answer your question because they would prefer that you just go away; they don't want to encourage you to come back and insult them again.
  • Keep trying to solve your problem. Even after posting, you still have responsibility for your problem, because you are the one being paid to solve it.
  • If no-one answered your question, it was probably your fault. Give more information. Try to explain yourself better. Perhaps nobody knows the answer, in which case you will have to find it on your own.
  • You are asking a favor. No-one has any responsibility to help you. You have not paid any money to use Hibernate. Nevertheless, the level of "free" support provided is far beyond what you could expect from most commercial software vendors. Even though the support is provided for free, it is certainly not free to the person providing it. They are taking time away from their own busy life to help you. Most of the time they take great pleasure from this - but only when they are treated with respect.
  • RTFM is a completely valid response to your question. If you are told to read the documentation, do it! The documentation explains some things in much greater depth than can be explained in a forum post. A common complaint about open source software is that it is underdocumented. A number of people put a lot of time and effort into ensuring that this is not true of Hibernate, so please take advantage of this fact.

Consider for-pay support

The Hibernate team (all of us) believe strongly in the JBoss Group model of "professional open source". We believe that for open source software to truly compete with commercial products, open source developers must be able to derive an income from their work. Already, revenues derived from commercial training, support and consulting services helps support the development of Hibernate.

We are absolutely committed to providing services that are true value for money; we strive to make Hibernate as easy to use as possible - nevertheless there are things we can communicate in-person that are simply very difficult to get across in documentation or the user forum.

      

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