My code works fine if I use a long, but I'm getting this with a string:

ERROR - SessionImpl.execute(2379) | Could not synchronize database state with session
net.sf.hibernate.HibernateException: Batch update row count wrong: 0

here's my mapping for it:

<id name="id" type="string" column="USER_ID" unsaved-value="null">
<generator class="assigned"/>
</id>

I was able to get the insert to work by changing from saveOrUpdate() to just save(). Could somebody shed some light on this? I'd rather not have to write the code to check if the entry exists and then explicity call update.

saveOrUpdate() in 2.1.7 won't work with generator=assigned, because there is no way for Hibernate to figure out if the object is unsaved or not.

it should be able to work if you have implemented Interceptor.isUnsaved()

...and is called Interceptor.isTransient() in H3

thanks for the response. I'm using 2.1.6 and spring 1.1.3, but I'm not quite sure how to implement isUnsaved().

This isn't working unfortunately. Do I do a select in isUnsaved and return false if the entry was found?

Interceptor e = getHibernateTemplate().getEntityInterceptor();
e.isUnsaved(getHibernateTemplate().saveOrUpdate(user));

If you want to do a select before update, use select-before-update=true