Accessing stateless EJBs in PreDestroy method of Singleton - java

I have a problem accessing stateless EJBs in the preDestroy method of an singleton. I need to log the shutdown of the application server in an database table.
This is what the singleton looks like:
#Startup
#Singleton
public class ServerShutdown {
#EJB
TableFacade tableFacade;
#PreDestroy
private void shutdown() {
TestEntity e = tableFacade.find("test");
//do something
}
}
Here's example code of the stateless bean:
#Stateless
public class TableFacade {
...
public TestEntity find(String test) {
Query query =
getEntityManager().createNamedQuery("TestEntity.namedQuery");
return (TestEntity) query.getSingleResult();
}
}
If the server is shutting down, the preDestroy method is accessed and the EJB method is called. But during the call, the server seems to force the shutdown process and cancels the calling of the EJB method.
I'm using Java EE 6, JDK 1.8, EJB 3.1, eclipselink 2.5.2.
Thanks in advance

The #predestroy should only do ejb resource cleanup, such as connection, variable etc...
Your problem has to do with the transaction context, infact from the spec:
The PreDestroy lifecycle callback interceptor methods for stateless
and stateful session beans execute in an unspecified transaction
context.
And then:
For example, it would be wrong to perform database operations within a
stateful session bean’s PostConstruct or PreDestroy lifecycle callback
interceptor methods and to assume that the operations are part of the
client’s transaction. The PostConstruct and PreDestroy methods for
stateful and stateless session beans are not controlled by a
transaction attribute because handling rollbacks in these methods
would greatly complicate the session instance’s state diagram.
So, it is not explicitly forbidden, but you are warned that things may go wrong.

According to the ejb 3.2 spec, singleton beans are allowed to access ejb's in their pre destroy method. See section 4.8.6 Table 3. If a singleton bean needs to access another singleton bean, then it must declare its dependency using the #DependsOn annotation. The example provided by the original poster should work.

Related

Transaction management in EJB 3.0 and hibernate

I am trying to understand the transactions management and try to use its power in my already existing application developed in Struts 2, EJB 3 and hibernate 5.2.
Now I have ejb in my business layer like below
#Stateless
#TransactionManagement(TransactionManagementType.CONTAINER)
public class MyEJb implements ejbxyz {
#Override
public void method(){
Dao dao=new Dao() //Dao class is simple java class
dao.fooMethod(); //this method updates some record
dao.barMethod(); // this method updates some other record
}
}
public class Dao{
fooMethid(){
Session session=sessFactory.openSession();
session.beginTransaction();
session.update(x);
}
barMethod(){
try{
Session session=sessFactory.getCurrentSession();
session.getNamedQuery("xyz").executeUpdate();
}catch(HibernateException ex){
session.getTransaction.rollback();
}
}
}
I understand that Transaction management should be done at service layer(at ejb in my case). But how can I achieve this over there. ?
Now the dependency is if barMethod() fails to update the record then I need to rollback the changes made in fooMethod. So basically I need both the methods to be done in one transaction.
When I execute the application it throws the below exception
Exception while barMethod getNamedQuery is not valid without active transaction
Its because I am not beginning any transaction in barMethod. But then I really dont want to start a new transaction and want to continue with the older transaction started in fooMethod.
Container managed transactions are indeed suported out of the box for EJB beans. However, your Dao class is not a managed bean - it is a regular pojo that you instantiate manualy - therefore it does not participate in any transaction started by your other ejb.
So move your Dao to separate file, annotate it with #Stateless and then inject it into your service using #EJB private Dao dao;
There is more to transactions in Ejb container though. You can control the transaction support on method level via #TransactionAttribute annotation, that specifies how should the container invoke your method with regard to transaction. That way you can control, whether your method requires its own transaction, or if it shall participate in a transaction initiated by the caller(e.g. when invoked from ejb bean). For more info have a look at official Java EE tutorial

Transaction propagation in asynchronous ejb method call

We have two EJB session beans as given below;
#Stateless
public class MyStatelessSessionBean{
#EJB
MyStatefulSessionBean statefulBean;
public void methodA(){
statefulBea.methodB();
}
}
#Stateful
# TransactionAttribute(TransactionAttributeType.REQUIRED)
public class MyStatefulSessionBean {
#Asynchronous
public void methodB(){
}
}
A client, which is not in any in any transaction, invoke methodA of MyStatelessSessionBean. How many distict transactions will be started by container after all processing has completed ?
There will be 2 transactions started. As EJB 3.1 specification states in point 4.5.3:
Client transaction context does not propagate with an asynchronous method invocation. From the Bean Developer’s view, there is never a transaction context flowing in from the client. This means, for example, that the semantics of the REQUIRED transaction attribute on an asynchronous method are exactly the same as REQUIRES_NEW.

Java CDI #PersistenceContext and thread safety

Is an EntityManager #Inject[ed] as follows in muliple classes threadsafe?
#PersistenceContext(unitName="blah")
private EntityManager em;
This question and this one seem to be Spring specific. I am using Jave EE CDI services
To my great surprise (after years of using jpa in spring) EntityManager is not thread safe. This is actually understandable if you think about it deeper: EntityManager is just a wrapper around native JPA implementation, e.g. session in Hibernate, which in turns is a wrapper around jdbc connection. That being said EntityManager can't be thread safe as it represents one database connection/transaction.
So why does it work in Spring? Because it wraps target EntityManager in a proxy, in principle using ThreadLocal to keep local reference per each thread. This is required as Spring applications are built on top of singletons while EJB uses object pool.
And how can you deal with that in your case? I don't know cdi but in EJB each stateless and stateful session bean is pooled, which means you cannot really call method of the same EJB from multiple threads in the same time. Thus EntityManager is never used concurrently. That being said, injecting EntityManager is safe, at least into stateless and stateful session beans.
However injecting EntityManagerto servlets and singleton beans is not safe as possibly several threads can access them at the same time, messing up with the same JDBC connection.
See also
Mind thread-safety when injecting EntityManager
The EntityManager is not thread-safe
Although EntityManager implementations itself are not thread safe the Java EE container injects a proxy which delegates all methods invocations to a transaction bound EntityManager. Therefore each transaction works with it's own EntityManager instance. This is true for at least transaction-scoped persistence context (which is default).
If container would inject a new instance of EntityManager in each bean the below wouldn't work:
#Stateless
public class Repository1 {
#EJB
private Repository2 rep2;
#PersistenceContext(unitName="blah", type = PersistenceContextType.TRANSACTION)
private EntityManager em;
#TransactionAttribute
public void doSomething() {
// Do something with em
rep2.doSomethingAgainInTheSameTransaction();
}
}
#Stateless
public class Repository2 {
#PersistenceContext(unitName="blah", type = PersistenceContextType.TRANSACTION)
private EntityManager em;
#TransactionAttribute
public void doSomethingAgainInTheSameTransaction() {
// Do something with em
}
}
doSomething->doSomethingAgainInTheSameTransaction call happens in a single transaction and therefore the beans must share the same EntityManager. Actually they share the same proxy EntityManager which delegates calls to the same persistence context.
So you are legal use EntityManager in singleton beans like below:
#Singleton
#ConcurrencyManagement(ConcurrencyManagementType.BEAN)
public class Repository {
#PersistenceContext(unitName="blah", type = PersistenceContextType.TRANSACTION)
private EntityManager em;
}
Another proof is that there is no any mention of thread safety in EntityManager javadoc. So while you stay inside Java EE container you shouldn't care about concurrency access to EntityManager.
I feel I need to go deeper into this because my first answer was not absolutely true.
I will refer to JSR-220 (EJB 3.0). In section 5.2 Obtaining an EntityManager you may find:
An entity manager may not be shared among multiple concurrently
executing threads. Entity managers may only be accessed in a
single-threaded manner.
Well that's it. You may stop reading here and never use EntityManager in singleton beans unless properly synchronized.
But I believe there is a confusion in the spec. There are actually two different EntityManager implementations. The first is one is provider implementation (saying Hibernate) which is not obliged to be threadsafe.
On the other hand there is a container implementation of EntityManager. Which is also not supposed to be threadsafe according to the above. But container's implementation acts as a proxy and delegates all calls to the real provider's EntityManager.
So further in the spec in 5.9 Runtime Contracts between the Container and Persistence
Provider:
For the management of a transaction-scoped persistence context, if
there is no EntityManager already associated with the JTA transaction:
The container creates a new entity manager by calling
EntityManagerFactory.createEntityManager when the first invocation of
an entity manager with Persistence- ContextType.TRANSACTION occurs
within the scope of a business method executing in the JTA
transaction.
This means in turn that there will be a different EntityManager instance for each transaction started. The code that creates an EntityManager is safe according to 5.3:
Methods of the EntityManagerFactory interface are threadsafe.
But what if there is an EntityManager associated with JTA transaction? The code that binds an EntityManager associated with current JTA transaction may be not threadsafe according to the spec.
But I can't really think of an application server implementation that works correctly with EntityManager injected into stateless beans and not correctly within singletons.
So my conclusions are:
If you want to follow the JSR-220 strictly then never use EntityManager in singletons until synchronizing the access to it.
I personally will continue to use EntityManager in singleton because my application server implementation works perfectly with it. You may want to check your implementation before doing so.

Calling a CDI session scoped producer method from an EJB stateless session bean

I want to inject the current user using #Inject #Current User across all layers (i.e. web layer, EJB layer). In order to do this, I have the following CDI Producer method:
#Named
#SessionScoped
public class UserController {
#Resource SessionContext sessionContext;
#EJB UserDao userDao;
#Produces #Current
public User getCurrentUser() {
String username = sessionContext.getCallerPrincipal().getName();
User user = userDao.findByUsername(username);
}
}
#Qualifier
#Target({TYPE, METHOD, PARAMETER, FIELD})
#Retention(RUNTIME)
public #interface Current{}
Now, I want to inject the current user into an EJB stateless session bean as follows:
#Stateless
public class SomeBackendService {
#Inject #Current
private User user;
}
My question: Is the current user object always re-injected after the session changes, because the dependencies of a stateless session bean are normally injected once at creation time and the bean may be pooled and used across different sessions?
Although I haven't tried this exact situation, in CDI beans are normally not re-injected. Instead, a proxy is injected that is aware of its context.
Via this mechanism, it's possible to inject say a session scoped bean in an application scoped bean. Every user of the application scoped bean goes to the same bean and the same proxy, but the proxy will then dynamically resolve calls on it to a different bean for each user.
So even though the scope of #Stateless is basically 'application', it would be possible that the proxy that represents User in your `SomeBackendService' still delegates to the correct session scoped version.
p.s.
If with layers you actually mean modules as in web and EJB modules that are part of an EAR, it's going to be a little bit more complicated, as CDI doesn't always works as expected between modules (especially in JBoss AS). This is partly due to the ambiguity of what an 'application' and thus the application scope is within an EAR.
Yes, to each business method called the container will be re-injected all dependencies of your SLSB. Here is text that guarantees this in EJB 3.1 specification:
"If a session bean makes use of dependency injection, the container injects these references after the bean instance is created, and before any business methods are invoked on the bean instance." - Section 4.3.2
I had this doubt too and I posted a question explaining this situation
here
By design, your stateless session bean should not have a state "User", it's stateless by all means.
If you want your EJB to have states, then use #Stateful instead.

Is it okay to pass injected EntityManagers to EJB bean's helper classes and use it?

We have some JavaEE5 stateless EJB bean that passes the injected EntityManager to its helpers.
Is this safe? It has worked well until now, but I found out some Oracle document that states its implementation of EntityManager is thread-safe. Now I wonder whether the reason we did not have issues until now, was only because the implementation we were using happened to be thread-safe (we use Oracle).
#Stateless
class SomeBean {
#PersistenceContext
private EntityManager em;
private SomeHelper helper;
#PostConstruct
public void init(){
helper = new SomeHelper(em);
}
#Override
public void business(){
helper.doSomethingWithEm();
}
}
Actually it makes sense.. If EntityManager is thread-unsafe, a container would have to do
inercept business()
this.em = newEntityManager();
business();
which will not propagate to its helper classes.
If so, what is the best practice in this kind of a situation? Passing EntityManagerFactory instead of EntityManager?
EDIT: This question is very interesting so if you are interested in this question, you probably want to check out this one, too:
EDIT: More info.
ejb3.0 spec
4.7.11 Non-reentrant Instances
The container must ensure that only one
thread can be executing an instance at
any time. If a client request arrives
for an instance while the instance is
executing another request, the
container may throw the
javax.ejb.ConcurrentAccessException to
the second client[24]. If the EJB 2.1
client view is used, the container may
throw the java.rmi.RemoteException to
the second request if the client is a
remote client, or the
javax.ejb.EJBException if the client
is a local client.[25] Note that a
session object is intended to support
only a single client. Therefore, it
would be an application error if two
clients attempted to invoke the same
session object. One implication of
this rule is that an application
cannot make loopback calls to a
session bean instance.
And,
4.3.2 Dependency Injection
A session bean may use dependency injection
mechanisms to acquire references to
resources or other objects in its
environment (see Chapter 16,
“Enterprise Bean Environment”). If a
session bean makes use of dependency
injection, the container injects these
references after the bean instance is
created, and before any business
methods are invoked on the bean
instance. If a dependency on the
SessionContext is declared, or if the
bean class implements the optional
SessionBean interface (see Section
4.3.5), the SessionContext is also injected at this time. If dependency
injection fails, the bean instance is
discarded. Under the EJB 3.0 API, the
bean class may acquire the
SessionContext interface through
dependency injection without having to
implement the SessionBean interface.
In this case, the Resource annotation
(or resource-env-ref deployment
descriptor element) is used to denote
the bean’s dependency on the
SessionContext. See Chapter 16,
“Enterprise Bean Environment”.
I used a similar pattern, but the helper was created in #PostConstruct and the injected entity manager was passed in the constructor as parameter. Each EJB instance had its own helper and thread-safety was guaranteed then.
I also had a variant were the entity manager was not injected (because the EJB wasn't using it altogether), so the helper has to look it up with InitialContext. In this case, the Persistence context must still be "imported" in the parent EJB with #PersistenceContext:
#Stateless
#PersistenceContext(name="OrderEM")
public class MySessionBean implements MyInterface {
#Resource SessionContext ctx;
public void doSomething() {
EntityManager em = (EntityManager)ctx.lookup("OrderEM");
...
}
}
But it's actually easier to inject it (even if the EJB doesn't use it) than to look it up, especially for testability.
But to come back to your main question, I think that the entity manager that is injected or looked up is a wrapper that forwards to the underlying active entity manager that is bound to the transaction.
Hope it helps.
EDIT
The section § 3.3 and § 5.6 in the spec cover a bit the topic.
I've been using helper methods and passed the EntityManager there, and it is perfectly OK.
So I'd recommend either passing it to methods whenever needed, or make the helper a bean itself, inject it (using #EJB) and inject the EntityManager there as well.
Well, personally, I wouldn't like to have to pass the Entity Manager to all my POJOs in my constructors or methods. Especially for non-trivial programs where the number of POJOs is large.
I would try to create POJOs/HelperClasses that deal with the Entities returned by the EntityManager, instead of using the entitymanager directly.
If not possible, I guess I'd create a New EJB Bean.

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