I have a requirement to set a java system property to a particular xml parser implementation at runtime which would be different from what was set initially when the application loaded up. I want to set this only when certain entities are being inserted or updated into the respective tables and they have a custom hibernate usertype that uses this parser internally, so I want to know is there any event method that will be called before a customxmluser type is used by hibernate when the respective entities are saved/updated. I tried setting it in the nullsafeset method but it does not work for me.