I am pretty new to Hibernate but I find the project extremely well managed and well written. I am currently designing a content management system using Hhibernate as the persistance layer. My problem/question is regarding versioning. I am trying to find a way to store multiple versions of the same object so that I can roll back changes long after the session.

I can see two ways of accomplishing this:
1. Somehow force Hibernate to always do inserts instead of updates, increasing the version on the inserts (possibly by having a composite key).
2. Using an interceptor to somehow store copies of objects when an update occurs.

Any help/suggestions would be very appreciated. I am not really sure what the best solution would be or even if my 2 solutions are even possible.

Thanks

// Ulmus

My Suggestion: Use a database trigger to store a copy in another table.

We are implementing such a concept by just creating an explicit Version entity and an explicit Asset entity; an Asset references a List of Versions. So creating a new Version is done fully explicitly in Java code. This makes it far easier to see what is going on (and allows us to share Versions among Assets, or roll back by re-referencing an earlier Version at the head of the Asset's version list, etc.).

I think doing this at the database level is too low-level to support rich version management semantics. Just do it explicitly in your data model.

Cheers,
Rob

Oh yes, and read this paper:

http://www.opencm.org/papers/cpcms2001.pdf

Cheers!
Rob