Deep clone of Hibernate entity

Question

I am wondering how can I create a deep copy of a persisted object with all of its association. Let say I have the following model.

class Document {
    String title;
    String content;
    Person owner;
    Set<Citation> citations;
}

class Person {
    String name;
    Set<Document> documents;
}

class Citation {
    String title;
    Date date;
    Set<Document> documents;
}

I have a scenario in which a user might want to grab a copy of a particular document from a person and make the document his/hers then later he / she can change its content and name. In that case I can think of one way to implement that kind of scenario which is creating a deep copy of that document (with its associations).

Or maybe if anyone knows of any other possible way to do such thing without doing huge copy of data because I know it may be bad for the app performance.

I was also thinking of may be creating a reference of to the original document like having an attribute originalDocument but that way I won't be able to know which attribute (or maybe association) has been changed.

Answer 1

To perform a deep copy :

public static <T> T clone(Class<T> clazz, T dtls) { 
        T clonedObject = (T) SerializationHelper.clone((Serializable) dtls); 
        return clonedObject; 
  }

This utility method will give a deep copy of the entity, and you can perform your desired things what you want to do with the cloned object.