I'm sure this is straightforward but can't find the answer. I have a whole bunch of business objects (POJOs) all descended from a base BusinessObject class. I would like a method in this class to be run every time an object is about to be persisted to the database. Can this be done?

The method is just a timestamping one (setting created and last modified dates), and there may be another way of doing this which I would be keen to hear of.

TIA.

Take a look at Interceptor and Lifecycle

Yes, that's definitely the answer, thanks. I'm using Spring with Hibernate, and have a service layer managed by Spring. If you are familiar with Spring, how would I use this Interceptor in a Spring context? Would I subclass it and add it as one of the interceptors configured for org.springframework.transaction.interceptor.TransactionProxyFactoryBean, say? (Sorry if this is more of a Spring question than a Hibernate one).