How does getHibernateTemplate().save(...) work?

[femibyte]

How does the save(..) method of HibernateTemplate really work? I was able to use the find method to obtain a Product object with a primary key of productId, modify it and call save(product) on it. I expected to obtain an exception about trying to save an already existing product, but instead what happened was that the record in the database for that product was updated. I would have thought that I needed to use the update(...) method instead.

[Colin Sampaleanu]

All this does is call Hibernate's Session.save(). This actually has nothing to do with Spring, so please take a look at the Hibernate docs, which are pretty extensive.