I've just started investigating Hibernate and I have a newbie question.

I am trying to create an empty object, "mark it as persistent", then set the fields, hoping that when the session is flushed, proper insert statement will happen. However, I could not make it working with save or persist methods – it is failing on not null properties. Is this possible and if not, is there a workaround?

The reason why I am trying to do this is that I have a rich client user interface that is setting the properties after an empty object is created. Hibernate is doing a great job of tracking changed (updated) objects, and something similar for inserts would be great. Otherwise I will have to programmatically track new objects and once all properties are set, to call save or persist.

I am little confused about this question.

From what I understanding, "dynamic-insert" and "dynamic-update" should solve your problem.

Please let me know what you think.

I don't think that dynamic insert would solve it. To clarify, here is the scenario that I would like to do:

1. Instantiate an empty object.
2. Call Session.persist or something similar (this is what I refer to as "mark as persistent", I am not sure if such thing exists).
3. Call setters to populate the fields.
4. Commit or flush (this is where the actual insert will happen).