I am attempting to create a transaction involving the creation of a new user and assigning roles to that user at the same time. Every user is getting the role of "ROLE_USER". Now my question is, is there a way to get hibernate to recognize that a "ROLE_USER" in the db already and to use that one instead of creating a new one/throwing an error (depending on if i force uniqueness).

I know I can just look up ROLE_USER through hibernate every time a new user is made and add role or I could have statics that are initialized at app launch, but I figured I'd see if there was a "short cut" where if I just put user.addRole("ROLE_USER") it would be smart enough to just use the existing ROLE_USER if there was one.

Thanks!

If the "ROLE_USER" is the primary key of the role, you should be able to do something like this:



I have used this technique sometimes, but mostly I do lookup in the database. Beware of actions that cascades from the user to the role object It may have side-effects since the role object have empty properties for everything except the primary key.