While looking at the mapping documents for the User class, I came upon this declaration:

<id name="id"
type="long"
column="USER_ID"
unsaved-value="null"
access="org.hibernate.auction.persistence.DirectSetAccessor">
<generator class="native"/>
</id>

What is the purpose of the DirectSetAccessor class?

Thanks in Advance

It is a custom PropertyAccessor class.

This I can understand. But I was wondering why a custom PropertyAccessor is used in this particular case.

I was wondering the same thing myself. Maybe just for demonstration purposes?

You can take a look at the source to actually see what it is doing yourself :)

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/h ... iew=markup

I prefer this accessor for immutable properties: It uses a direct field set call, while calling the getter for reads. That way, I don't have to have private setters which are never called in my application code (only by Hibernate). It makes my IDE stop complaining about unused methods.