Hi everyone,

I have a problem where hibernate is saving empty records to the database. The scenario that I have is - I have an Person object which has a many-to-one relationship with an Address. The Person's constructor creates a new Address object each time a Person is instantiated. The reason I am doing this is because I am using on the UI and the Person's Address cannot be null. From the screen, the user has the option to enter the Address information or not. What I've noticed is that when the Address information is not entered, Hibernate still saves and empty Address record to the database. I am suspected that this is because the Address is not null (even though other attributes within Address are). Is there a way to specify to to Hibernate that if an object is "empty" that it should not get saved to the database?

Thanks in advance!

I can think of a couple of ways but the best is to handle this in your UI code. Have a variable in your form that is initialized from Person address and is set back to person before saving. Another way would be to write an interceptor that intercepts your Person objects before saving and sets addresses to null when they are empty. This is ugly though. There might be a better way.

Would the Null Object pattern be of help here?

http://www.developer.com/design/article.php/3697611
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Object_pattern

Instead of inserting new Addresses, Hibernate could associate the Person with a single "null" address of a designated id.

e.g.:


I haven't actually implemented something like this yet. I assume there would be many more kinks to work out.