Hi,
I am using compound primary keys for my POJOs which means I must explictly assign a value to it. I want to set up a listener so that this will be done automatically.

I know there are annotations @PrePersist, @PreUpdate which will receive events. However these are called for ever persist or commit for the POJO. I only need to assign the compound key once and only once not every time it is persisted or updated. I could use these annotations and include an if statement but I would of thought this is a common problem for compound primary keys so there must be a cleaner solution.

I was wondering does anyone know a smarter way of doing it?
Thanks

if a listener can do it, I guess a custom id generator might be cleaner

Thanks for that, do you have link where I can get a good example of this.
I have checked the JDoc and Java Persistence with Hibernate (Gavin King, Manning) and can't find a good example.
I am a bit confused as to how to go about what you say, anybody with any links it would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers

no link in mind

Ok, thanks for getting back, I'll create a new thread looking for info on this if that's ok.