Hi,
I would like to know your opinion about the best approach using Hibernate for auditing a record. In other words, I have a table with the following audit fields:

Date-Created (date)
Date-Updated (date)
Created-By (date)
Updated-By (date)

and I want to update these fields when a record is created/updated.

I want to use a db-agnostic approach (no triggers). I understand that Interceptors should be the right tool here.
Are there better approaches?

Thanks
Luciano

Another possible approach is to use an AOP proxy. If you're already using Spring this is simply a matter of implementing an interceptor (base classes that do most of the heavy lifting are already provided) and wiring it up in the application context.

See http://www.springframework.org/docs/reference/aop.html

Do you want a History Object. The fields you have will have is not sufficient for auditing purpose. If you want the entire record to be audited the you create a corresponding HistoryObject which has the same fields as the original one and an extra attribute objectId which holds the id of the original object. When you save the original object you also save the history object. The HistoryObject will have a constructor which takes the the original object and copies all the fields from the original to the History fields and the ID of the original to the objectID of the History object.

I wrote a generator which does this for me automatically. In this approach you can even save the relationships(i.e if you wanted or selectively save related objects). This works really good

eg
class User{

Long id;
String a1;
String a2;

// createdDate,createdBy, updateDate, updatedBy

// get and set methods

}

class UserHist{
Long id;
Long objectId;
String a1;
String a2;

public UserHist(User u)
{

this.objectId = u.id;
this.a1 = u.a1;
this.a2 = u.a2;
// createdDate,createdBy, updateDate, updatedBy

}
}

public class UserDAO
{
void save(User u){

saveorUpdate(u);
UserHist uh = new UserHist(u);
saveorUpdate(uh);
}

}