Here's my scenario:

1) Class A is JPA annotated and configured as a persistable class in Hibernate
2) In my flow, I have an instance of A which was created outside Hibernate. Its NON-NULL fields represent fields that need to be updated.
3) I want to update A's values in the database but I want to ignore null values of A (ie: the update shouldn't set things to null)

I've read up on merge(), saveOrUpdate(), and @org.hibernate.annotations.Entity(selectBeforeUpdate = true, dynamicUpdate = true).

It seems like I want to do some combination of calling merge() along with annotating A with @Entity(dynamicUpdate = true).

What I'm really trying to avoid here is having to write a whole bunch of ifs for every field in A to determine which non-null fields need to be updated.

What is the proper way to do this?

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Anyone have any insight on this?

Sorry I don't have a solution but I am looking for the exact same thing. I'm trying to implement a generic REST end point for PUT calls. The only problem with this that i can think of is the problem that you describe above.

Anyone have ideas?

Chris

Hi,

i'm also looking for a solution to ignore null-values in an update query. the dynamicUpdate settings, as already mentioned, only updates unmodified values. if a value of my dom object is null, it interprets this as a change :((. so we basically need a critera to be set for this attribute, that it is ignored in an update statement if it is null. i couldn't find a proper solution until now, so i'm also
very interested if someone know how to do it properly.

thx!

greetings,
bens0n