I have a question similar to this: http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=951806

When calling saveOrUpdate, I don't want to persist all properties of the object at times while at other times, I like to persist them all.

Specifying update=false in the mapping will result in saveOrUpdate NEVER persisting the property which is undesirable. Is there a way to programatically specify which properties to exclude from persisting right before the call to saveOrUpdate()

I know I can do this by writing HQL or by creating two similar properties and persisting one of them but I'm hoping for a simple solution like:

session.excludeFromUpdate(User.class, "password");

I know this is too ideal but is there anything of the sort?

Nope, nothing like that. Hibernate persists objects, not bits of objects, so it's highly unlikely to ever be implemented like that. I know I'd argue against it. If you have fields that you don't always want saved, you could use a one-to-one cascade="none" to the same table, and have a main object and a rarely-saved object, then figure out in business logic when you should save the rarely-saved object.

In a web application using JSF...

The reasoning behind my insanity:
Maintaining all my entity objects in the http session (or faces saveState) on the front end seems to be an inefficient solution when saving/updating. It also isn't very practical to maintain all the entity properties in the form. Instead, I would like to just pass in what needs updated from the form, instantiate the entity bean within the backing bean (done automatically by faces), leave everything else null, and do the save/update on it for only values that are not null.

How it is an inadequacy- My current options:
1) Persist the whole entity bean in the http session (very bad idea)
2) Pass all of the entity properties to the front end in the form as input text/hidden fields and pass them back to the managed bean (even worse)
3) Before instantiating the saveOrUpdate() method get the current instance from Hibernate and merge the changed properties from the passed instance (lesser of the evils, but is still a bad idea)

The ideal solution:
Just as Hibernate provides the capability to manipulate what properties are returned to the entity bean in a SELECT [Example.create(myEntity).ExcludeZeros().ExcludeProperty(myPropName)], allow a form of Criteria to be added to do the same in an INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE.

That's a slightly different question to the one asked before. You can what you need with only a little change. Instead of starting with an empty object, load the object you want to change from the DB using the normal get() or load() method. In your mapping, add the dynamic-update="true" property to the relevant classes. This means that only the updated values will be saved, the others will be omitted from the update statement.

Can this be done programmatically rather than using dynamic-update="true"? I only want to do this on an ad hoc basis.

The ad hoc question is what this topic was originally about. No, it can't be done ad hoc. My earlier suggestion (the one-to-one cascade="none") is still the best pure-hibernate solution, I think.