Scribd
Upload
224 views

How To Implement A Soft Delete With Hibernate: Update The Record Instead of Deleting It

This document discusses how to implement a soft delete with Hibernate by: 1. Using an @SQLDelete annotation to update records to a "DELETED" state instead of deleting them. 2. Adding a @PreRemove method to update the entity's state before removal. 3. Applying a @Where clause to exclude "DELETED" records from queries.

Uploaded by

Adolf
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
224 views

How To Implement A Soft Delete With Hibernate: Update The Record Instead of Deleting It

This document discusses how to implement a soft delete with Hibernate by: 1. Using an @SQLDelete annotation to update records to a "DELETED" state instead of deleting them. 2. Adding a @PreRemove method to update the entity's state before removal. 3. Applying a @Where clause to exclude "DELETED" records from queries.

Uploaded by

Adolf
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 3

Implement a soft delete with Hibernate

How to implement a soft delete with Hibernate


To implement a soft delete with Hibernate, you have to:
1. tell Hibernate to perform a SQL UPDATE instead of a DELETE
operation and
2. exclude all “deleted” records from your query results.

Update the record instead of deleting it


To implement a soft delete, you need to override Hibernate’s default
remove operation. You can do that with an @SQLDelete annotation.
This annotation allows you to define a custom, native SQL query that
Hibernate will execute when you delete the entity. You can see an
example of it in the following code snippet.

@Entity
@SQLDelete(
sql = “UPDATE account SET state = ‘DELETED’
WHERE id = ?”,
check = ResultCheckStyle.COUNT)
public class Account { … }

That is all you need to do to create a basic soft delete


implementation. But there are 2 other things you need to handle:
1. When you delete an Account entity, Hibernate doesn’t update
the value of its state attribute in the current session.
2. You need to adapt all queries to exclude the deleted entities.

www.thoughts-on-java.org
Implement a soft delete with Hibernate
Update state property in current session
Hibernate doesn’t parse the native query you provide to the
@SQLDelete annotation. It just sets the values of the bind parameters
and executes it. It, therefore, doesn’t know that you provided an SQL
UPDATE statement instead of a DELETE statement to the
@SQLDelete annotation. It also doesn’t know that the value of the
state property is outdated after it performed the delete operation.

If your code might use the entity object after it got deleted, you need
to update the state property yourself. The easiest way to do that is to
use a lifecycle callback, as I do in the following code snippet. The
@PreRemove annotation on the deleteUser method tells Hibernate to
call this method before it performs the remove operation. I use it to
set the value of the state property to DELETED.

@Entity
@SQLDelete(
sql = “UPDATE account SET state = ‘DELETED’
WHERE id = ?”,
check = ResultCheckStyle.COUNT)
public class Account {

@PreRemove
public void deleteUser() {
this.state = AccountState.DELETED;
}

www.thoughts-on-java.org
Implement a soft delete with Hibernate
Exclude “deleted” entities in queries
Hibernate’s @Where annotation allows you to define an SQL snippet
which Hibernate adds to the WHERE clause of all queries. The
following code snippet shows a @Where annotation that excludes a
record if its state is DELETED.

@Entity
@SQLDelete(
sql = “UPDATE account SET state = ‘DELETED’
WHERE id = ?”,
check = ResultCheckStyle.COUNT)
@Where(clause = “state <> ‘DELETED'”)
public class Account { … }

As you can see in the following code snippets, Hibernate adds the
defined WHERE clause when you perform a JPQL query or call the
EntityManager.find method.

Account a = em.find(Account.class, a.getId());

16:07:59,511 DEBUG SQL:92 – select account0_.id as


id1_0_0_, account0_.name as name2_0_0_, account0_.state
as state3_0_0_ from Account account0_ where
account0_.id=? and ( account0_.state <> ‘DELETED’)

www.thoughts-on-java.org

You might also like