title: How to make an attribute inside an entity read-only?
body: <p>I have this attribute (that is a collection) inside an entity. It is formed by doing a JoinTable with another table. Is it possible to make whatever updates are performed on this attribute by other services/clients/views/etc. to not be saved into the database? </p>
  
  <p>So in other words, I just want to extract from the database this attribute, but I don't want to save its updated state back in. The reason is I have another way of updating these columns in the database and that should be the official way to update this column, then later I can read the updated values with this attribute again. </p>
  
  <p>Edit: Here is some code</p>
  
  <pre><code>Class Person:
  
  @JoinTable(name="PERSON_DEPENDENCY",  
               joinColumns = @JoinColumn(name = "parent_id")  
               inverseJoinColumns = @JoinColumn(name = "child_id"))  
  Set&lt;Person&gt; children;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>There is another similar annotation for property parents (just parent_id and child_id is swapped from above annotation). If A is the parent of B, saving A's children will result in a row where parent_id = A's id child_id = B...while saving B's parents will also result in the same exact row. Ideally I want to just save 1 of these collections and that should be sufficient, but at the same load both to quickly know the parent/children of a person. </p>