I have a Spring application that uses Hibernate together with JTA. Recently I found out that on the service layer when an Hibernate object was loaded and some parameter changed as a result, the changes later occurred in database although

getHibernateTemplate().saveOrUpdate(myObject);

or any other save method was never called for that object. It came out that all the changes made to objects loaded with Hibernate in service layer directly went to database.

Is there some configuration key that enables to turn of this feature and make the objects state go to database only if save method is explicitly called on the object?

This is the current Hibernate configuration in sessionFactory:

<props>
<prop key="hibernate.dialect">
org.hibernate.dialect.OracleDialect
</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.show_sql">false</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.cache.use_minimal_puts">true</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.hibernate.cache.provider_class">
org.hibernate.cache.EhCacheProvider
</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.query.factory_class">
org.hibernate.hql.classic.ClassicQueryTranslatorFactory
</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.transaction.factory_class">
org.hibernate.transaction.JTATransactionFactory
</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.jta.UserTransaction">
java:comp/UserTransaction
</prop>
</props>


Thanx in advance for any tips.

If you make a change to the loaded object in the context of the same transaction Hibernate will automatically update the database.

If the object is a "detached" object, any changes made to it will not be persisted to the Database.

You would need to close the session/transaction and then make changes to your object.