When Hibernate retrieves a persistent instance of a class from the database, is there any particular order in which it calls the setter methods of its properties? As I understand, Hibernate will call the default no-args ctor first to instantiate the instance and then calls the setters.

My question arises because of the following situation. I have a class in which there are two properties. In the setter for the second property, I do some validation based on the value of the first property. If the validation fails I throw a runtime exception. I have another ctor (non-default) which actually takes these two properties as arguments and calls the two setters in the right order. But since Hibernate does not call that non-default ctor. So I am getting that exception on retrieval even though while persisting the property values were correct.

I would appreciate any insight.

Thanks

The order they are specified in the mapping document. (Note that this order also determines the column order in the generated SQL.)

If the first property of ClassA is an instance of another class ClassB, and the second property is a value type (in that order in the mapping), then while constructing ClassA, does Hibernate "completely construct" (meaning call the default ctor and all the setters) the first property instance of ClassB, before calling the setter for the second property?

What I observed was ClassB instance was not completely constructed before the setter for the second property was called. I am a little confused as to why I was seeing this behavior.

Thanks

No. This is due to Hibernate's two-phase load which is an extremely important and sophisticated performance optimization.

(Note that anyway, no ORM implementation would be able to guarantee this - consider the case of circular references.)

So is it advisable that, in the setters, I do NOT perform argument validation (and throw runtime exceptions for invalid arguments)? I have noticed that I get those runtime exceptions randomly, meaning it appears Hibernate calls those setters in the right (according to my business class) order sometimes and sometimes in a different order. Can you advise if there is another way of getting around this (without actually having to remove that argument validation from the setters)?

use access=field for your properties or supply sperate getters only Hibernate will use.

Sorry, setters I mean.

Or implement the Validatable interface