Human readable descriptions on entity fields

My current project is using Hibernate/JPA as our DB access technology. We have all of our entities described using JPA annotations. What we need now is a way to add a human-readable description String to each @Column and @Table. We want to be able to use these in the code as tooltips as well as to compile a "data dictionary", describing to the user the purpose of each field in the DB.

Something like...

@Column( name="myCol" desc="The purpose of this column")

...would be great.

Is there anything of this sort? I've looked through the docs and a Hibernate book. I can't find anything so far.

If nothing like this exists, can somebody suggest an alternative approach?

[758 byte] By [codebooka] at [2007-11-27 8:17:46]