Hi,

My application maintains user information through web forms. Whenever a user changes their email address I need to send them a confirmation note to the new address.

So far my best option for determining email address changes seems to be adding logic to the setEmailAddress() method of my User POJO to track updates and to configure Hibernate with access="field" so as not to set the field on reads. After the save I need to send the email and reset the isEmailAddressUpdated flag.

Is there a more elegant way?

Thanks in advance,

Steve

I would suggest that your proposed solution, to do it all in business logic, is correct most of the time. It has the advantage that if other processes are allowed modify the table, you don't detect a change by another process as making the field dirty.

If you can guarantee that no other process is allowed to access the DB, then your question is reasonable. I'd like to know the best answer myself: there have been a few topics recently about this, and they all admit to having to go back to the DB to check for dirty fields.