Hi, I have a many-to-many relationship between two objects called "Big" and "Small". I am receiving data to persist from another system where each message contains one "Big" item and numerous "Small" items. I have added a created_date and updated_date field to each table using an EntityInterceptor.

Two messages will always contain a different "Big" object but most of the "Small" objects will be the same. Therefore I want to only INSERT or UPDATE "Small" items that have changed. If I don't include my audit fields then everything works fine and I don't see items updated unnecesarily.

My problem seems to be that when specifying the updated_date in my mapping file onFlushDirty() is always called for the "Small" items because the updatedDate field is null and has not been set yet (createdDate is ignored because I set update="false" on it). Can I tell hibernate to ignore this field when checking for dirty status?

I tried adding optimistic-lock="false" but this didn't seem to work...



My code calls dao.saveOrUpdate(big) and it takes care of the related collection of Small items. Prior to the UPDATE statements foreach small item I can see hibernate calling SELECT using their source_id, so would have thought they were loaded in the session. Do i have do a merge or something?