Hibernate Annotations - Which is better, field or property access?

Question

This question is somewhat related to Hibernate Annotation Placement Question.

But I want to know which is better? Access via properties or access vi

Answer 1

I would strongly recommend field access and NOT annotations on the getters (property access) if you want to do anything more in the setters than just setting the value (e.g. Encryption or calculation).

The problem with the property access is that the setters are also called when the object is loaded. This has worked for me fine for many month until we wanted to introduce encryption. In our use case we wanted to encrypt a field in the setter and decrypt it in the getter. The problem now with property access was that when Hibernate loaded the object it was also calling the setter to populate the field and thus was encrypting the encrypted value again. This post also mentions this: Java Hibernate: Different property set function behavior depending on who is calling it

This has cause me headaches until I remembered the difference between field access and property access. Now I have moved all my annotations from property access to field access and it works fine now.