With Grails 3.1.0RC1 and Hibernate:

beforeInsert(), beforeUpdate() and other GORM event methods are not called on a domain abstract base class declared in src/main/groovy (i.e. the Grails equivalent of a JPA MappedSuperclass).

These methods were called, if present, in the same context in Grails 2.4.

One typical use case for such an abstract base class is an Audit or other common base class for entities, where fields such as dateCreated and createdBy will be nullable: false and require beforeInsert() and beforeUpdate() implementations to set the initial value.

There is a likely a workaround for this which I am about to test: Implementing a GORM Event listener by subclassing org.grails.datastore.mapping.engine.event.AbstractPersistenceEventListener and calling the methods that do not get called explicitly for all domain classes that extend the base class.

Reference to related issue #620.