Hi,

our current application retrieves an object graph from the database and sends this down to the client. In our case it is a person the person has associated addresses. We retrieve all of that information effectively putting a lock on anything associated with a person, if the person gets updated then all the associated addresses are marked dirty and get updated even if they were not updated.

This has the potential to cause concurrency issues as the address maintenance is on a different screen from the person detail maintenance i.e. one person could try to update the addresses when another is updating a person (maybe this is unlikely).

What is the best practice in this situation? We are using DTOs to send up and down the wire, then hooking them up to the actual domain objects each time.

Thanks,

B

Use "Optimistick Locking", a pattern to solve this.
Hibernate supports it, you won't have to write code, nor do checks for dirty data nor manage locking issues, just enable it and add the version field to the relevant entities.

http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/core/reference/en/html/transactions.html#transactions-optimistic