How can you make a created_at column generate the creation date-time automatically like an ID automatically gets created?

Question

I currently have an Entity as below:

@Entity
public class Product {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
    private Long productId;
          


        

Answer 1

With the mix of @dimitrisli and @buddha answers, something pretty clean is

@Data
@MappedSuperclass
public abstract class BaseEntity {

    @Column(updatable = false)
    @CreationTimestamp
    private LocalDateTime createdAt;
    @UpdateTimestamp
    private LocalDateTime updatedAt;
}

And now you all your entity can extend that class like so

@Data
@Entity
@EqualsAndHashCode(callSuper = true)
public class User extends BaseEntity {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    public UUID id;
    public String userName;
    public String email;
    public String firstName;
    public String lastName;
}

Note that you might not need @Data & @EqualsAndHashCodeannotation annotations from lombok as it generate getter/setter