There are a few cases in my application where it would be helpful to generate identifiers for my objects before saving them to the database.

Does anyone have suggestions on how this can be done with hibernate?

Thanks.

Have you tried using the "assigned" generator-class for the objects that you want to create id's for? Or i misundestood your question?

Ideally, I'd like to keep using hibernate to generate the keys for me. What I was hoping for was a way to ask hibernate to assign identifiers to everything without actually committing the transaction.

I beleive flushing the session generates the ids but doesn't commit the transaction. It does update/insert to the database as required and that could be a liability depending on your reason for wanting to get the ids now.