I'm looking at the API for updating objects, and was wondering if there is a way to easily accomplish an update for a single property.

For example, a method along the lines of:

Session.updateProperty(Object foo, String property, Object value);

Ideally, this mechanism would be smart enough to do things like throw a StaleObjectException if appropriate, etc. I can edit the operations of the properties for save/update in the mapping file, and I think this would probably(?) serve as a mechanism for overriding this as well (i.e. this could be used to update a property set to be ignored by default).

Is there a way to do this/recommended mechanism already? Or is this a reasonable RFE?

Cheers,

-Will

You can read the Hibernate metamodel at runtime, e.g. for a Category POJO class:

Thanks for the super-fast reply, christian.

It's not a question of the metamodel (which is a great feature, btw). It's a question of issuing an update for a single property (while leveraging all of the rest of Hibernate's infrastructure).

For example, let's say that I've got an object with a great many properties. I'd like to just update one of them, instead of the whole record (perhaps several of the properties are relatively lengthy). Right now, I can get the object, change one property, and then save it, but I'd like to skip the intermediate get. Obviously, I'd still need to drag along the object ID (and possibly the version/timestamp).

Hm, don't know a good solution for that, as I can't see a good way to not load an object if you want to update it. You can use dynamic update, so if the UPDATE SQL is your problem, this will only UPDATE the changed columns.