Save object in database if it does not already exist (Hibernate & Spring) - spring

Question

I'm working on a Hibernate/Spring application to manage some movies.
The class movie has a many to many relationship with the class genre.
Both of these classes have generated id's using the GeneratedValue annotation.
The genre is saved through the movie object by using #Cascade(CascadeType.SAVE_UPDATE)
I have placed a unique constraint on the genre's type attribute (which is it's name; "Fantasy" for example).
What I would like to do now is have Hibernate check if there is already a genre with type "Fantasy" and if there is, use that genre's id instead of trying to insert a new record.
(The latter would obviously throw an error)
Finally what I need is something like select-before-update but more like select-before-save.
Is there such a function in Hibernate?
Some code:
Movie class
#Entity
public class Movie {
#Id
#GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.AUTO)
private int id;
private String name;
#Lob
private String description;
#Temporal(TemporalType.TIME)
private Date releaseDate;
#ManyToMany
#Cascade(CascadeType.SAVE_UPDATE)
private Set<Genre> genres = new HashSet<Genre>();
.... //other methods
Genre class
#Entity
public class Genre {
#Column(unique=true)
private String type;
#Id
#GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.AUTO)
private int id
....//other methods

Answer 1

You may be over-thinking this. Any select-before-update/select-before-save option is going to result in 2 DB round trips, the first for the select, and the second for the insert if necessary.
If you know you won't have a lot of genres from the outset, you do have a couple of options for doing this in 1 RT most of the time:
The Hibernate second-level cache can hold many if not all of your Genres, resulting in a simple hashtable lookup (assuming a single node) when you check for existence.
You can assume all of your genres are already existing, use session.load(), and handle the new insert as a result of the row not found exception that gets thrown when you reference a genre that doesn't already exist.
Realistically, though, unless you're talking about a LOT of transactions, a simple pre-query before save/update is not going to kill your performance.

Answer 2

I haven't heard of such a function in Hibernate select-before-update/select-before-save
In situations like these you should treat Hibernate as if it was JDBC.
First if you want to know if you even have such a Genre you should query for it.
if you do. then the SAVE_UPDATE will not create a new one when you add it to a movie.
if you don't, Hibernate will create a new Genre row in the database and add the connection to the many_to_many table for you.