Does HibernateTemplate work with Envers? If so, how?

Question

I am trying to use Envers on a project that also uses Hibernate and Spring - and I appreciate a lot the code reduction offered by HibernateTemplate.

I configured Envers under JPA, and after a few tweaks I was able to have the schema generated by the EnversHibernateToolTask Ant task (including the auditing tables). However, when I write code such as:

    hibernateTemplate.saveOrUpdate(f);

the data is persisted, but nothing goes to the auditing tables. Conversely, if I write:

    EntityManager em = emf.createEntityManager();
    em.getTransaction().begin();
    em.persist(f);
    em.getTransaction().commit();

then data goest to the audit tables (but I'd rather use the former syntax - I know using JPA's EntityManager decouples that code from Hibernate, but it simple does not pay off the hassle - changing ORM engine is not in my wildest dreams for this project.)

It may help to check my applicationContext.xml configuration:

<bean id="entityManagerFactory"
    class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean">
    <property name="persistenceUnitName" value="projetox" />
    <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
    <property name="jpaVendorAdapter">
        <bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.HibernateJpaVendorAdapter">
            <property name="showSql" value="true" />
        </bean>
    </property>
</bean>
<bean id="hibernateTemplate" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateTemplate">
    <property name="sessionFactory" ref="sessionFactory" />
</bean>

<bean id="sessionFactory"
    class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean">
    <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
    <property name="packagesToScan" value="com.w2it.projetox.model" />
    <property name="hibernateProperties">
        <props>
            <prop key="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5Dialect</prop>
        </props>
    </property>
</bean>

<bean id="dataSource" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource"
    destroy-method="close">
    ...
</bean>

and here is my persistence.xml setup:

<persistence-unit name="projetox" transaction-type="RESOURCE_LOCAL">
    <jta-data-source>java:/DefaultDS</jta-data-source>
    <properties>
        <property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5Dialect" />
        <!--  Hibernate Envers -->
        <property name="hibernate.ejb.event.post-insert"
            value="org.hibernate.envers.event.AuditEventListener" />
        <property name="hibernate.ejb.event.post-update"
            value="org.hibernate.envers.event.AuditEventListener" />
        <property name="hibernate.ejb.event.post-delete"
            value="org.hibernate.envers.event.AuditEventListener" />
        <property name="hibernate.ejb.event.pre-collection-update"
            value="org.hibernate.envers.event.AuditEventListener" />
        <property name="hibernate.ejb.event.pre-collection-remove"
            value="org.hibernate.envers.event.AuditEventListener" />
        <property name="hibernate.ejb.event.post-collection-recreate"
            value="org.hibernate.envers.event.AuditEventListener" />
    </properties>
</persistence-unit>

Does anyone have a hint on what is going on here? Thank you!

Answer 1

HibernateTemplate has its JPA counterpart, JpaTemplate which provides a fairly similar functionality.

The reason Envers doesn't work with HibernateTemplate is because it relies on JPA events (you can see the listeners declared in your persistence.xml above) triggered when EntityManager is used. It's possible in theory to write code to trigger those events from Hibernate session when HibernateTemplate is used, but it's rather involved.

Answer 2

All u needed to do was put @Transactional in your Dao or services which call the dao.save()/ update methods.

Even if you register your eventlistener these events are not fired unless you use transcational of the Spring FW. Spring has to know and tell hibernate that these events are fired.