What's the best way to implement audit fields in entities?

[magoicochea]

I have many tables on my database that have audits fields (user_cr,date_cr,user_up and date_up).

What would be the best way to implement this in Seam? I don't want to have these fields repeated in every single entity class.

I know how to do this using @MappedSuperClass , but that would mean that all my entities with audit fields would have to extend that class, which may be a little bit rigid, I'd like to have a class containing this fields that could be assigned as an attribute to the entity class, like:

public AuditFields getAuditFields
{
   return auditFields;
}

public void setAuditFields(AuditFields auditFields)
{
   this.auditFields = auditFields;
}

Also, how could Seam help me to set the values of the creation fields and an entity is persisted to the database and update the values of the update fields when the entity is modified?

[fernando_jmt]

If you want to audit your entities changes you can consider to use the project Envers. This project makes easy the audit process on entities state with just only straightforward annotations. I tried it out and it's good.

[vladimir.kovalyuk]

Looks very interesting ...
But I doubt it can help with SMPC in manual flush mode. I should investigate this.

[gjeudy]

You can get ideas on how this can be done with either hibernate interceptor approach where you log full change in a separate audit table.

Audit Logging

Or you can look at EJB3 listeners to update create tstamp and update tstamps on your entity.

Hibernate Event listeners

I think create-onflush and merge are probably the events you are looking for for create and update respectively. On 2nd thought you can probably achieve create/update tstamps logic in a regular Hibernate interceptor, the choice is yours.

[magoicochea]

Thanks for your help, I think that may be what I was looking for. I'm going to investigate about that and see if that fits what I want to do.