Is it possible to prevent generation of a <composite-id> element in the Hibernate mappings created by Hibernate Tools? Creation of the primary key will be handled by some DDL in a <database-object> element instead, so I would like for these columns to just be treated just like normal columns.

I've tried unchecking the "Generate basic typed composite ids" option in my Hibernate Code Generation configuration, but it has no noticeable effect.

This is tangentially related to the use case described here.

To prevent generation of composite id look at id.hbm.ftl and persistent-class.hbm.ftl templates and update them.
After this provide custom templates for hibernate tools. (http://docs.jboss.org/tools/2.1.0.Beta1 ... tml#d0e921 if you use eclipse plugins)