What I want to do: an insert, update or delete occurs for items I've marked with (my own) annotation @Auditable, and hibernate intercepts this and inserts, as part of the same transaction, an entry in the audit table.

Problems:

1. which is more suited, Interceptor or event listeners?
2. how can I dig back from an interceptor to find its session, since I want to do session.save()?
3. alternatively, I know I can get the session from some of the event listeners, is it legit to actually use that session to do inserts from inside an event handler?
4. If I do the above, will I be inserting into the same transaction as the one in which I did the session.save(auditable) ?
5. What's the distinction between PersistEventListener and SaveOrUpdateEventListener? How can I tell an insert from an update in event listeners?

Could anyone please help me out with these? The reference docs on this area of Hibernate are a tad sparse.

I wrote an article around this at http://anshuiitk.blogspot.com/2010/11/h ... event.html . But I think you need envers (auditing framework) and not Interceptors or listeners.