Hibernate, save the previous state of an object

Question

Is there any generally accepted, proven-to-work way using hibernate, that keeps a history of an entitys changes in the database?

We need to keep track of quite some

Answer 1

JBoss envers is perhaps what you are looking for.

The Envers project aims to enable easy auditing/versioning of persistent classes. All that you have to do is annotate your persistent class or some of its properties, that you want to audit, with @Audited. For each audited entity, a table will be created, which will hold the history of changes made to the entity. You can then retrieve and query historical data without much effort.

Similarly to Subversion, the library has a concept of revisions. Basically, one transaction is one revision (unless the transaction didn't modify any audited entities). As the revisions are global, having a revision number, you can query for various entities at that revision, retrieving a (partial) view of the database at that revision. You can find a revision number having a date, and the other way round, you can get the date at which a revision was commited.