Hi,

I'd like to ask whether it's possible to 'clone' an object (or rather a graph of hibernated objects) and persist them as new ones, keeping all existing properties, and updating all associations to use the 'cloned' references to objects... I'd need that badly to add timestamp-like functionality (I've checked the hibernate timestamps briefly, but I'd need more than that).

Plain Old Example:


Sample data:


Data I'd need to get after the cloning (somehow):


..and then I'd update the 'timestamps' myself before persisting these objects..

Is there any way to achieve such functionality? If I need to take the hard, manual way, what would be the less painful way to updates all the associations as well beside cloning the objects?

thanks much,
dyn

You can use the Hibernate metadata API to implement deepcopy algorithms. I've no idea whats wrong with Hibernate's auto-timstamping though.

Oh, also, other people use Interceptor for this kind of thing.

I'm not 100% sure hibernate's timestamping won't be enough, I only think so. Let me explain briefly what I'd need:

I have to store versioned entities, a whole graph of them for every month ('timestamp' would be YYYY-mm therefore). I must be able to load entities for a specified year/month (this date can be in the future as well), and update them without changing the timestamp. Possible missions include loading all entities for 2003 september, updating them, and save back with the same year/month (normal behaviour); or loading all entities for 2003 september, updating all of them for 2003 october, and commit back (preparing next month data). Is that possible with Hibernate's versioning?

I'll investigate the metadata and the Interceptor approach for my needs meanwhile.

Thanks.
dyn

Would the little know replicate() method be a solution to this problem?