I tried to use an Interceptor to create protocol objects for changes made on persistent objects. Each protocol object maps the change of the state of a single property of the persistent object. Creating the protocol objects works very well with the Interceptor.

Now I want to store the protocol objects to the database with session.save(protocol object) in onFlushDirty(). This causes a flush() and I get a recursion.

What's the best thing to do here? Implement findDirty() on my own (I tried to do this, but got some weird side effects during save), or save the protocol objects in postFlush()? Or anything else?

I do something very similiar, creating a DeltaSet object in the onflushDirty() encompassing a set of PropertyChange attributes.

The way I do this is to push the DeltaSet through an auditing framework to a JMS queue. A queue listener then persists the DeltaSet to the database. I have setups where it uses a seperate SessionFactory and a setup where it uses straight JDBC.

HTH

It seems, that you are using different sessions/transactions to save the DeltaSet and to save the persistent object.

I need to save the persistent object and the protocol object in the same transaction. Any idea?

The feed to the JMS queue happens on the same XA transaction in my setup. So if the DB operations rollback, the DeltaSet stuff is not released to the queue...

Is your interceptor Session-level or SessionFactory-level? Assuming JTA: if session, then grab another session from the factory without the interceptor; else define another session factory without the interceptor, but which uses the same JTA datasource.