Sorry, I posted this accidentaly in the wrong forum section but could not find a way to delete or move it.

My data object has a ModifiedBy attribute/column that should be updated every time a data object is changed. The column should be set to the id of the current user (stored in the session of my webapp).

I figured out several ways to implement this behavior so what I'm looking for is some sort of best practice advice:
a) Obviously I can't specify a default value in my HBM file as I do with the ModifiedOn timestamp column since I need to access a Java variable, or is there some way to use variables in this context?
b) use a saveOrUpdate Method in my DAO class, which is manually called on every change to set the value
c) use a preInsert/preUpdate event listener to set the values
d) use an interceptor to do so

I suppose this szenario is quite common so I hope that you can point me into the right direction or share your experience what worked best for you.

Thanks a lot,
Peter[/i]

I would opt for the preInsert/preUpdate listeners. There is nice article on the ServerSide http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=JPAObjectModel which uses JPA. Even if you are using Hibernate directly I think you should be able to get some ideas.