Question

I have a table with a generated id, but in some cases I would like to set it on my own. Can I, somehow, force Hibernate to ignore the @GeneratedValue?

Answer 1

It may be an overkill but have you thought about writing your own CustomIDGenerator which probably subclasses say the AutoGenerator of hibernate and exposes a couple of methods where you can set the id of the next class object to be generated so for example

class MyGenerator extends .... {

public void setIdForObject(Class clazz, Long id) {
    //once you use this API, the next time an object of 
    //type clazz is saved the id is used
}

public void setIdForObject(Class clazz, Long id, Matcher matcher) {
    //once you use this API, the next time an object of 
    //type clazz is saved and the matcher matches yes the id will be 
    //assigned. Your matcher can match properties like name, age etc
    //to say the matched object
}
}

This could get complicated but at the least is possible as per hibernate doco