Question

Do you have a common base class for Hibernate entities, i.e. a MappedSuperclass with id, version and other common properties? Are there any drawbacks?

Example:

@MappedSuperclass() public class BaseEntity {      private Long id;     private Long version;     ...      @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)     public Long getId() {return id;}      public void setId(Long id) {this.id = id;}      @Version     public Long getVersion() {return version;}     ...      // Common properties     @Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)     public Date creationDate() {return creationDate;}     ... }  @Entity public class Customer extends BaseEntity {     private String customerName;     ... } 

Answer 1

This works fine for us. As well as the ID and creation date, we also have a modified date. We also have an intermediate TaggedBaseEntity that implements a Taggable interface, because some of our web application’s entities have tags, like questions on Stack Overflow.