Question

very stupid question since I’ve been using hibernate for some time now but I was facing a special case and suddenly realised that I’m not sure how hibernate populates the DB entities.

public class User {
    ...
    @Column
    private String name;

    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }
}

When hibernate creates a new instance of User (when loading from the DB) how will it populate the property name of that instance? I always assumed hibernate would call setName for this but the case I’m having makes me suspect hibernate ignores the setter and (with reflection) sets the field’s value directly?

thanks,
Stijn

Answer 1

Hibernate annotations and JPA use the placement of the Annotation to determine what kind of access to use. In the example you provided above, it would use field access.

from the Hibernate Annotations documentation:

Depending on whether you annotate fields or methods, the access type used by Hibernate will be field or property. The EJB3 spec requires that you declare annotations on the element type that will be accessed, i.e. the getter method if you use property access, the field if you use field access. Mixing annotations in both fields and methods should be avoided.