I have some FK'd declared on the database level. I didn't tell Hibernate about them because I felt it would be cumbersome to make an object out of a table with a single string field. I just wanted referential integrity enforced by something and it seemed easiest to do it that way.

Problem is now that when I insert a (mostly blank) record, Hibernate will default the field to '' rather than NULL, thus causing a key violation exception.

It's trivial to add a '' record to the table the FK is based on, but it shouldn't be necessary I figure.

What's the right way to handle this?

Of course, Hibernate does not do this.

Thank you. I'm coming to that conclusion.

It's either BeanUtils.copyProperties or Struts itself. I know my code aint mentioning this property.

The nominees are Hibernate or Apache.

The envelope please....

http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22371

I'm sorry for thinking it was you first :)