Hibernate interceptors or audit events?

Question

I am recording a history of all changes for some objects and am going to implement a mechanism like Envers to take care of this automatically. My question is whether to use Hibernate interceptors or their event system ?

Interceptors seem to be a bit simpler and do whatever I need. And the Hibernate documentation suggests using interceptors to "track audit information." But their audit information is not in the table of related services for each facility, and Envers uses an event system, which I suppose for some reason.

I am using Spring 3.0 and Hibernate 3.5 (latest stables).

UPDATE : database triggers are not desirable for this situation. I really want to hear thoughts about sleep mode interceptors and events for audit logs / revision history.

Answer 1

I think the significant difference between the two is that you can only define one Interceptor in your SessionFactory, but you can register many listeners for a specific event.

I am going to use Interceptors since I only need something very simple: timestamp when my object is created (annotation @Versiontakes care of updating the lastModified property).

<bean id="sessionFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean">
    <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
    <property name="hibernateProperties">
        <props>
            <prop key="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect</prop>
            <prop key="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto">create</prop>
        </props>
    </property>
    <property name="packagesToScan" value="com.x.domain" />
    <property name="entityInterceptor" ref="onSaveInterceptor" />
</bean>

http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/core/3.6/reference/en-US/html/events.html#objectstate-interceptors