Easy way to save basic auditing data on domain objects?

Question

My application uses large trees of domain objects and for most of these objects I'd like to persist some basic information (updatedby, modified time, etc.). I have already added these properties & columns to my application.

I was about to code the setting of these values in all the various constructors, etc. when it occurred to me that the persistence layer should handle this transparently.

But how?

I could certainly do this from within my DAO's, but how to handle the objects that are persisted via a cascade save? Is there a way to intercept the persist() method on those?

What's a good way to implement this capability?

Answer 1

You might want to take a look at Hibernate Envers.