All of our tables have lastupdatetime and createtime columns. I need to set these attributes on the objects to be saved/updated at the latest possible time right before the objects are persisted - what options do I have to do this with hibernate? The Interceptor onSave()/onFlushDirty() methods seems one way - I tried it, but could not get it to work.

Thanks in advance for your help.

You can add two fields of Calendar (or Date time) to your class, one for lastupdatetime and another for createtime, and initialize this fields when you create your instances. The Calendar type is "native" for hibernate. Simple and easy!

Good luck

I would also suggest you look into Optimistic Locking options for lastupdatetime and let Hibernate handle this field for you using the <timestamp> mapping.

Thanks for the reply. Let me clarify, I already do have these attributes on the classes to be persisted and I am temporarily setting these values
as Calendar when I create instances of these classes on the client layer.

But, I want to set these values later on the server side so that they are more accurate as to when they are actually persisted.

I thought I could do this via the Interceptor interface by setting the values in the onSave() and onFlushDirty() methods, but that is not working - maybe I'm not doing it right. I have something like:

onSave()
{
if( entity instanceof Auditable )
{
((Auditable)entity).setCreateDate(Calendar.getInstance());
}

return false;
}

Is this the wrong way of doing this?

You can use an Interceptor to do it but, and I don't have my code in front of me, I believe that the object is already in a state where it's ready to be persisted so you can't change the "entity", you have to loop through the property names and then update the state[].

Actually, look at pages 128-129 of the 3.0.5 reference docs and it gives this exact example.

'you have to loop through the property names and then update the state[]'

I had also tried this and made sure I returned 'true' from the onSave method, but it still did not work for me. I will try again and look at the example you provided. Thanks again.

BTW, I just added support for "db generated values" to CVS earlier this week. One of the manifestations of this is the ability to use the current database timestamp as the optimistic locking value.

Basically, you just do :


As long as the dialect you are using supports retrieval of the database's current timestamp (via select or direct function call). I got all the ones I knew; noone responded regarding the others on the dev list...

Also, WIP is the worst radio station *ever*; go eagles! :)

Thanks alot pksiv. I've looked at the ref doc many times, don't know how I overlooked that. Thanks again. It worked great.

Steve: EAGLES RULE! :-)