Hibernate - accessing database data using views

I have recently been working on a database for which I had no control
of the structure and it certainly was not laid out as I would have desired.

Interestingly the application that we were replacing had created convenience Views to access the data.
These Views were often complex typically including JOINS across several tables.

So it may be obvious but I decided to map some of my POJOs to these views.

A few provisos:

• The view needs to be designed such that there is still a column(s) that can be mapped to an ID.
• The views are clearly critical to the application so just as in the creation of tables the creation of these views MUST be under version control