In our application, we need to have fields that are assignable only once. At

Question

Editorial Team

Asked: May 26, 20262026-05-26T13:29:56+00:00 2026-05-26T13:29:56+00:00

In our application, we need to have fields that are assignable only once.

At first we thought of encapsulating the fields and making the setters private. However, some questions arouse:

Without a public setter, is Hibernate still able to map the field from the database?
Can I strip out the setter and make the field mutable only in the entity constructor?
Finally, is there any standard JPA way to make a field immutable?

Thanks in advance.

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

Editorial Team · Answer 1 · 2026-05-26T13:29:57+00:00

Ad. 1: I believe JPA uses plain private fields for both read and write if annotations are placed on fields and not on getters. Recently I discovered that Hibernate as an underlying JPA provider does not even need get*() and set*() methods at all. This was truly enlightening solution since from the beginning I thought Hibernate needs accessors. So the answer is: you don’t need setters as far as Hibernate is concerned.
Ad. 2: However please note that Hibernate still needs no-arg constructor, otherwise it will fail to load entities with a descriptive exception. This is also a JPA requirement.
Ad. 3: No, there isn’t. Remember that your collections would also had to be immutable.

The Archive Base Latest Questions