I'm still in the process of learning hibernate/hql and I have a question that's half best practices question/half sanity check.

Let's say I have a class A:

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

    @Column(unique=true)
    private String name = "";

    //getters, setters, etc. omitted for brevity
}

I want to enforce that every instance of A that gets saved has a unique name (hence the @Column annotation), but I also want to be able to handle the case where there's already an A instance saved that has that name. I see two ways of doing this:

1) I can catch the org.hibernate.exception.ConstraintViolationException that could be thrown during the session.saveOrUpdate() call and try to handle it.

2) I can query for existing instances of A that already have that name in the DAO before calling session.saveOrUpdate().

Right now I'm leaning towards approach 2, because in approach 1 I don't know how to programmatically figure out which constraint was violated (there are a couple of other unique members in A). Right now my DAO.save() code looks roughly like this:

public void save(A a) throws DataAccessException, NonUniqueNameException
{
    Session session = sessionFactory.getCurrentSession();

    try
    {
        session.beginTransaction();

        Query query = null;

        //if id isn't null, make sure we don't count this object as a duplicate
        if(obj.getId() == null)
        {
            query = session.createQuery("select count(a) from A a where a.name = :name").setParameter("name", obj.getName());
        }
        else
        {
            query = session.createQuery("select count(a) from A a where a.name = :name " + 
                "and a.id != :id").setParameter("name", obj.getName()).setParameter("name", obj.getName());
        }

        Long numNameDuplicates = (Long)query.uniqueResult();
        if(numNameDuplicates > 0)
            throw new NonUniqueNameException();

        session.saveOrUpdate(a);
        session.getTransaction().commit();
    }
    catch(RuntimeException e)
    {
            session.getTransaction().rollback();
            throw new DataAccessException(e); //my own class
    }
}

Am I going about this in the right way? Can hibernate tell me programmatically (i.e. not as an error string) which value is violating the uniqueness constraint? By separating the query from the commit, am I inviting thread-safety errors, or am I safe? How is this usually done?

Thanks!