Hibernate version:
3.0.2

I am trying to track changes that are made to an object and also track these changes in the database and was wandering if this is possible in hibernate. So for example if an object is updated I want to change the status of the current object and the effective_to date for the object and create a new object with the new values. That way I am creating a history of all the changes that have taken place in the database. Is this possible to do in hibernate. Searching the forums it appears that it is possible to use interceptors but they do not seem to make the changes in the database.

Any pointers esp if this is feasible would be appreciated.

Sonik

You should be able to do this with an Interceptor -- I've got an implementation of an Interceptor that updates an "activiity" table based on changes made to several other tables. It's a little tricky -- check out the Hibernate WIKI for examples.

You might be able to do this with Events. Events were new in H3. I haven't worked with them because I started with H2.

While you have probably considered this, are you sure what the application to manage the "history"? You could enforce the creation of history in all situations and would probably get better performance if done with db triggers.

Curtis ...

I'm using annotations (EJB 3) and I have something similar to what you want. While it is possible to do that with Entity Listeners, you will face some problems. Here is a piece of advice if you are going that way:

• Set all queries that are used (directly and indirectly) by the listeners to flush mode commit (Query.setFlushMode(FlushModeType.COMMIT)). Not doing so will most likely raise an exception.
• Watch for many-to-one relationships with optional = true. I am not being able to query these fields separately if they are null.
• Try not to initialize a second instance of the entity you are listening to (in order to get the currently persisted values), specially if that entity has lazy one-to-many relationships. You will also get an exception.

So I would recommend you to do your history in your business methods. Maybe you can generalize so it can be called for any entity, but using entity listeners does not sound like a good idea for the time being.