From the Hibernate book I read that you require property access for identifiers to prevent certain problems.
My question is if you must always have a setId method or just the getId will suffice, because I don't want to be able to update the id in Java code.

And what if I have a property with update="false". Do I still need a set method for that property if it has property access.

You can set your set methods to private if you don't want to expose them.

You can also use access="field" in the id mapping, which will bypass setters and getters altogether.

No, like I said I wanted to use properties to prevent certain problems.
Something needed property acess for id's.
Actually forgot what the problem was that I tried to prevent :)
I thought it had something to do with conversations.

Thanks. So easy that I didn't think about it :)
Maybe package access is not too bad too, to prevent warnings in my Intellij IDEA that private field is never set.