I did a search and couldn't find what I was looking for. I apologize if I am rehashing anything in this question. I am a newbie at Hibernate.

I am using Hibernate 3.x. (Using it within Spring 2.0 and JSF as the presentation MVC layer)

This is the scenario:
Let's say I have a db table mapped to TbMyTable.java (and TbMyTable.hbm.xml file)

There are 2 columns in this table:
item_id int (primary key),
item_name varchar(100)

When I retrieve from the db via Hibernate, I get a List of TbMyTable objects. Then I do whatever I need to display the List on the JSP, in this specific case, I am using a JSF dataTable. Great so far.

Let's say the item_name column is editable in the JSP. So the user goes down the list of items on the page and starts to edit some of the data in item_name column. Let's say out of the 10 rows, the user changed 3 of them. The changes are reflected in the List I have stored in the session scoped bean. The user then clicks the save button.

Question:
Is there any way to "detect" the 3 rows that were changed and issue updates on them as opposed to going through the entire 10 rows one by one and issuing a saveOrUpdate()?

Any help is much appreciated!

You are using an HTMLDataTable on the managed bean side or?
You can access to the actual row with this command:

TbMyTable actTb = (TbMyTable) this.getDataTable().getRowData();

If you get an error message, the datatable has even an method for the rowId. With that id, you can get the item from your TbMyTable List.

Hope this helps? Pls don't forget to rate...

Yes I am, via the <binding> property of the dataTable in the jsp.
I am aware that I can access the actual row, put some kind of action in my backing bean that gets called everytime something happens to the row, etc.

However, that means a roundtrip to the server each and every time right? I was hoping to avoid that.

So I was thinking the user will make changes in the dataTable in the jsp, then they will hit the "Save" button which then will call a method that will actually do the saving. The save method will iterate through the dataTable List and issue a hibernate save each time it iterates.

Is that a typical thing to do when trying to update rows like this?