JPA @Transient fields being cleared before @PreUpdate method is called

Question

I have an User Entity class that I\'m trying to do password hashing for. I thought that the easiest way to do this would be to create a password field annotated with @Transient

Answer 1

I solved this by setting updatable und insertable to false on the "transient" field, so in your case this would be:

@Column(name = "password", insertable = false, updatable = false)
private String password;

Therefore a table @column is required (which is kind of ugly) but it will never be filled (which was important in my case for security reasons).

I tested against Hibernate 4.3.4.Final and it worked for me. The field value was useable in my EntityLister @PrePersist and @PreUpdate methods but was not stored in the database.

Hope that helps anybody having similar problems.