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ManyToOne relationship is always null when finding entity in the same transaction

I have a ConversationEntity with a ManyToOne relationship with ModeratorEntity
#Entity
#Table(name="CONVERSATIONS")
public class ConversationEntity {
#Id
private Integer id;
private Integer moderatorId;
#ManyToOne
#JoinColumn(name="moderatorId", insertable=false, updatable=false)
private ModeratorEntity moderator;
}
#Entity
#Table(name="MODERATORS")
public class ModeratorEntity {
#Id
private Integer id;
private Integer name;
}
And a service class with a transactional method that first of all saves the ModeratorEntity and after that the ConversationEntity with the moderatorId previously created
#Transactional
public void doStuff(Moderator moderator, Integer conversationId) {
Integer moderatorId = moderatorService.save(moderator);
Integer conversationId = conversationService.save(conversationId, moderatorId);
//do other stuff
Conversation conversation = conversationService.findById(conversationId);
}
When I'm trying to find the ConversationEntity by the id in the same transaction, a few lines below, I'm getting the ConversationEntity with the field moderatorId set but with the ModeratorEntity object = null.
If I do this outside the transaction I'm getting the ModeratorEntity object properly set.
I tried using saveAndFlush in ModeratorRepository and ConversationRepository and set FetchType.EAGER in the ManyToOne relationship but none of them worked

There are many questions about similar problems. For example #Transactional in bidirectional relation with Spring Data returns null and Hibernate: comparing current & previous record.
As long as you are within a single transaction you'll always get the same instance and no data is actually loaded from the database. And since (it seems at least) you never set the reference to the ModeratorEntity it stays null.
Once you are in a new transaction the database gets accessed and JPA populates a new instance, now including a ModeratorEntity reference.
The possible fixes therefore are:
Instead of an id let moderatorService.save return an entity and set that in the Conversation. You might as well drop the moderatorId. This is the idiomatic way to do things with JPA.
Perform the query in a separate transaction. Springs TransactionTemplate might come in handy. While this does work it causes JPA internals to bleed into your application which I recommend to avoid.

JPA many-to-one relation - need to save only Id

I have 2 classes: Driver and Car. Cars table updated in separate process. What I need is to have property in Driver that allows me to read full car description and write only Id pointing to existing Car. Here is example:
#Entity(name = "DRIVER")
public class Driver {
... ID and other properties for Driver goes here .....
#ManyToOne(fetch=FetchType.LAZY)
#JoinColumn(name = "CAR_ID")
private Car car;
#JsonView({Views.Full.class})
public Car getCar() {
return car;
}
#JsonView({Views.Short.class})
public long getCarId() {
return car.getId();
}
public void setCarId(long carId) {
this.car = new Car (carId);
}
}
Car object is just typical JPA object with no back reference to the Driver.
So what I was trying to achieve by this is:
I can read full Car description using detailed JSON View
or I can read only Id of the Car in Short JsonView
and most important, when creating new Driver I just want to pass in JSON ID of the car.
This way I dont need to do unnesessery reads for the Car during persist but just update Id.
Im getting following error:
object references an unsaved transient instance - save the transient instance before flushing : com.Driver.car -> com.Car
I dont want to update instance of the Car in DB but rather just reference to it from Driver. Any idea how to achieve what I want?
Thank you.
UPDATE:
Forgot to mention that the ID of the Car that I pass during creation of the Driver is valid Id of the existing Car in DB.

You can do this via getReference call in EntityManager:
EntityManager em = ...;
Car car = em.getReference(Car.class, carId);
Driver driver = ...;
driver.setCar(car);
em.persist(driver);
This will not execute SELECT statement from the database.

As an answer to okutane, please see snippet:
#JoinColumn(name = "car_id", insertable = false, updatable = false)
#ManyToOne(targetEntity = Car.class, fetch = FetchType.EAGER)
private Car car;
#Column(name = "car_id")
private Long carId;
So what happens here is that when you want to do an insert/update, you only populate the carId field and perform the insert/update. Since the car field is non-insertable and non-updatable Hibernate will not complain about this and since in your database model you would only populate your car_id as a foreign key anyway this is enough at this point (and your foreign key relationship on the database will ensure your data integrity). Now when you fetch your entity the car field will be populated by Hibernate giving you the flexibility where only your parent gets fetched when it needs to.

You can work only with the car ID like this:
#JoinColumn(name = "car")
#ManyToOne(targetEntity = Car.class, fetch = FetchType.LAZY)
#NotNull(message = "Car not set")
#JsonIgnore
private Car car;
#Column(name = "car", insertable = false, updatable = false)
private Long carId;

That error message means that you have have a transient instance in your object graph that is not explicitly persisted. Short recap of the statuses an object can have in JPA:
Transient: A new object that has not yet been stored in the database (and is thus unknown to the entitymanager.) Does not have an id set.
Managed: An object that the entitymanager keeps track of. Managed objects are what you work with within the scope of a transaction, and all changes done to a managed object will automatically be stored once the transaction is commited.
Detached: A previously managed object that is still reachable after the transction commits. (A managed object outside a transaction.) Has an id set.
What the error message is telling you is that the (managed/detached) Driver-object you are working with holds a reference to a Car-object that is unknown to Hibernate (it is transient). In order to make Hibernate understand that any unsaved instances of Car being referenced from a Driver about be saved should also be saved you can call the persist-method of the EntityManager.
Alternatively, you can add a cascade on persist (I think, just from the top of my head, haven't tested it), which will execute a persist on the Car prior to persisting the Driver.
#ManyToOne(fetch=FetchType.LAZY, cascade=CascadeType.PERSIST)
#JoinColumn(name = "CAR_ID")
private Car car;
If you use the merge-method of the entitymanager to store the Driver, you should add CascadeType.MERGE instead, or both:
#ManyToOne(fetch=FetchType.LAZY, cascade={ CascadeType.PERSIST, CascadeType.MERGE })
#JoinColumn(name = "CAR_ID")
private Car car;

public void setCarId(long carId) {
this.car = new Car (carId);
}
It is actually not saved version of a car. So it is a transient object because it hasn't id. JPA demands that you should take care about relations. If entity is new (doesn't managed by context) it should be saved before it can relate with other managed/detached objects (actually the MASTER entity can maintain it's children by using cascades).
Two ways: cascades or save&retrieval from db.
Also you should avoid set entity ID by hand. If you do not want to update/persist car by it's MASTER entity, you should get the CAR from database and maintain your driver with it's instance. So, if you do that, Car will be detached from persistence context, BUT still it will have and ID and can be related with any Entity without affects.

Add optional field equal false like following
#ManyToOne(optional = false) // Telling hibernate trust me (As a trusted developer in this project) when building the query that the id provided to this entity is exists in database thus build the insert/update query right away without pre-checks
private Car car;
That way you can set just car's id as
driver.setCar(new Car(1));
and then persist driver normal
driverRepo.save(driver);
You will see that car with id 1 is assigned perfectly to driver in database
Description:
So what make this tiny optional=false makes may be this would help more https://stackoverflow.com/a/17987718

Here's the missing article that Adi Sutanto linked.
Item 11: Populating a Child-Side Parent Association Via Proxy
Executing more SQL statements than needed is always a performance penalty. It is important to strive to reduce their number as much as possible, and relying on references is one of the easy to use optimization.
Description: A Hibernate proxy can be useful when a child entity can be persisted with a reference to its parent ( #ManyToOne or #OneToOne lazy association). In such cases, fetching the parent entity from the database (execute the SELECT statement) is a performance penalty and a pointless action. Hibernate can set the underlying foreign key value for an uninitialized proxy.
Key points:
Rely on EntityManager#getReference() In Spring
use JpaRepository#getOne() Used in this example,
in Hibernate, use load()
Assume two entities, Author and Book, involved in a unidirectional #ManyToOne association (Author is the parent-side) We fetch the author via a proxy (this will not trigger a SELECT), we create a new book
we set the proxy as the author for this book and we save the book (this will trigger an INSERT in the book table)
Output sample:
The console output will reveal that only an INSERT is triggered, and no SELECT
Source code can be found here.
If you want to see the whole article put https://dzone.com/articles/50-best-performance-practices-for-hibernate-5-amp into the wayback machine. I'm not finding a live version of the article.
PS. I'm currently on a way to handle this well when using Jackson object mapper to deserialize Entities from the frontend. If you're interested in how that plays into all this leave a comment.

Use cascade in manytoone annotation
#manytoone(cascade=CascadeType.Remove)

JPA #OneToOne with same type

How to annotate my code to have a Person with 2 Addresses :
#Entity
public Person {
// ... other attributes for a person
#OneToOne
public Address homeAddress;
#OneToOne
public Address workAddress;
}
#Entity
public Address {
// ... other attributes for an address
#OneToOne
public Person person;
}
Can I use OneToOne ?
Should I have to use options on this annotations ?

Unfortunately this is not possible to achieve with #OneToOne. The reason:
the persistence provider will have one Person id for two entries the Address table. This is not sufficient to decide which relation a given Address belongs to.
The simplest solution would be to add a type field (an enum) to the Address entity and map the addresses with #OneToMany/#ManyToOne.
In order to get the home address, you would need to iterate over the addresses and check for type.
Alternatively, you could create extra types like HomeAddress and WorkAddress which would derive from the Address. You could then keep the #OneToOne relations, but would end up with two additional types.
IMO a cleaner entity relation mapping is not a sufficient reason for doing this, as you are inviting some issues. For example a HomeAddress can never be a WorkAddress.
EDIT: If both Address ids are stored in the Person table, you should be able to use the#OneToOne relation. To ensure deletion of attached Address entities and deletion of orphaned Address entities, you can use cascading and orphan removal:
#OneToOne(cascade=CascadeType.ALL, orphanRemoval=true)
Although it might look like this makes sure that there could be no orphaned Address records in the DB, it is not entirely true. Orphan removal works only when you remove the referenced entity inside a transaction while the entities are attached. Furthermore it does not work for bulk updates. A DELETE FROM Person WHERE ... query will happily delete the Persons and will not touch the connected Addresses.

OneToOne implies a table has a foreign key to another, but you haven't specified which, and are implying that it isn't a real 1:1 situation from address->person. Will employee have a workAddress_ID and homeAddress_id field? In which case, there are two different 1:1s. What isn't valid is your address->Employee 1:1 as there is no way for it to use both the workAddress_ID and homeAddress_id relationships. You could work around this by having address have 2 OneToOnes that are private, and then a public getPerson method used by the application that returns the one that isn't null. Setting the person would require looking at the passed in person object ot know which of the Address 1:1's to populate, but it wouldn't matter as much since they wouldn't control the relationship:
public Address {
// ... other attributes for an address
#OneToOne(mappedby="workAddress")
private Person workPerson;
#OneToOne(mappedby="homeAddress")
private Person homePerson;
public Person getPerson() {
return workPerson==null? homePerson:workPerson;
}
public void setPerson(Person p) {
workPerson=null;
homePerson=null;
if (p !=null) {
if (p.getHomeAddress()==this) {
homePerson=p;
} else {
workPerson=p;
}
}
}
}

Explicit delete on JPA relationships

I am a bit confused about managing relationship in JPA.
basically I have two entities with a One to Many relationship
A configuration can have have a one or many email list associated with it.
#Entity
public class Config {
#OneToMany(mappedBy="owner",cascade=CascadeType.ALL, fetch=FetchType.EAGER)
private List<Email> emailReceivers;
}
#Entity
public class Email {
#ManyToOne
private Config owner;
}
In an EJB and during update/merge operation wherein I would edit the list of emails associated with a configuration,
I thought that I dont need to explicitly call the delete operation on my email Entity and I would just manage the relationship by deleting the email in my configuration email list.
#Stateless
public class ConfigFacadeImpl implements ConfigFacade{
#EJB
private ConfigDao configDao;
#EJB
private EmailDao emailDao;
#Override
public void update(Config Config, List<Email> emailsForDelete) {
if(emailsForDelete!=null && emailsForDelete.size() > 0){
for(Email emailTemp: emailsForDelete){
Email email = emailDao.find(emailTemp.getId());
emailDao.delete(email); // Do I need to explicitly call the remove??
config.getEmailReceivers().remove(email);
}
}
configDao.update(config);
}
}
If I don't execute the delete and only remove it from the list, it wont erase my table row.
The UI and the database is now not in sync as the UI would not show the email(s) that I have deleted but when you check the database, the row(s) are still there.
Is it required? I thought JPA would handle this for me if I would just remove it in my entities.
UPDATE
I have tweaked my code to get the entity from the database first before making any changes but still it is not deleting my child email entities. I wonder if this is an apache derby issues. (This is the correct way right as I am passing my entities from my JSF managed bean into my EJB so I need to get the sync from the DB first.)
#Override
public void update(Config config, List<Email> emailsForDelete) {
Config configTemp = configDao.find(config.getId());
if(emailsForDelete!=null && emailsForDelete.size() > 0){
for(Email emailTemp: emailsForDelete){
configTemp.getEmailReceivers().remove(emailTemp);
}
}
configDao.update(config);
}

Since you have already defined cascade type = CascadeType.ALL, JPA should take care of the deletion. Explicit Delete statement is not required.
These two statements are not required:
Email email = emailDao.find(emailTemp.getId());
emailDao.delete(email); // Do I need to explicitly call the remove??
Instead, you may want to just find the matching emailReceiver in config.getEmailReceivers() and remove the matching EmailReceivers as you are doing. There is no need to load the Email entity from the database.
EDIT: To delete orphan objects, you may want to include CascadeType.DELETE_ORPHAN cascade attribute along with CascadeType.ALL.

This is the same issue as in Why merging is not cascaded on a one to many relationship
Basically, JPA can only cascade over entities in your collection. So changes to child objects removed from the collection are never putinto the context, and so can't be pushed to the database. In this case, the oneToMany is controlled by the manytones back pointer, so even collection changes won't show up unless the child is also merged. Once a child is pruned from the tree, it needs to be managed and merged individually for changes to it to be picked up.

With JPA 2.0, you can use the option orphanRemoval=true in parent entity
Example:
#Entity
public class Parent {
...
#OneToMany(mappedBy="parentId",cascade=CascadeType.ALL, orphanRemoval=true)
private List<Child> childList;
...
}

One DAO per entity - how to handle references?

I am writing an application that has typical two entities: User and UserGroup. The latter may contain one or more instances of the former. I have following (more/less) mapping for that:
User:
public class User {
#Id
#GeneratedValue
private long id;
#ManyToOne(cascade = {CascadeType.MERGE})
#JoinColumn(name="GROUP_ID")
private UserGroup group;
public UserGroup getGroup() {
return group;
}
public void setGroup(UserGroup group) {
this.group = group;
}
}
User group:
public class UserGroup {
#Id
#GeneratedValue
private long id;
#OneToMany(mappedBy="group", cascade = {CascadeType.REMOVE}, targetEntity = User.class)
private Set<User> users;
public void setUsers(Set<User> users) {
this.users = users;
}
}
Now I have a separate DAO class for each of these entities (UserDao and UserGroupDao). All my DAOs have EntityManager injected using #PersistenceContext annotation, like this:
#Transactional
public class SomeDao<T> {
private Class<T> persistentClass;
#PersistenceContext
private EntityManager em;
public T findById(long id) {
return em.find(persistentClass, id);
}
public void save(T entity) {
em.persist(entity);
}
}
With this layout I want to create a new user and assign it to existing user group. I do it like this:
UserGroup ug = userGroupDao.findById(1);
User u = new User();
u.setName("john");
u.setGroup(ug);
userDao.save(u);
Unfortunately I get following exception:
object references an unsaved transient instance - save the transient
instance before flushing: x.y.z.model.User.group ->
x.y.z.model.UserGroup
I investigated it and I think it happens becasue each DAO instance has different entityManager assigned (I checked that - the references in each DAO to entity manager are different) and for user entityManager does not manager the passed UserGroup instance.
I've tried to merge the user group assigned to user into UserDAO's entity manager. There are two problems with that:
It still doesn't work - the entity manager wants to overwrite the existing UserGroup and it gets exception (obviously)
even if it worked I would end up writing merge code for each related entity
Described case works when both find and persist are made using the same entity manager. This points to a question(s):
Is my design broken? I think it is pretty similar to recommended in this answer. Should there be single EntityManager for all DAOs (the web claims otherwise)?
Or should the group assignment be done inside the DAO? in this case I would end up writing a lot of code in the DAOs
Should I get rid of DAOs? If yes, how to handle data access nicely?
any other solution?
I am using Spring as container and Hibernate as JPA implementation.

Different instances of EntityManager are normal in Spring. It creates proxies that dynamically use the entity manager that is currently in a transaction if one exists. Otherwise, a new one will be created.
The problem is that your transactions are too short. Retrieving your user group executes in a transaction (because the findById method is implicitly #Transactional ). But then the transaction commits and the group is detached. When you save the new user, it will create a new transaction which fails because the user references a detached entity.
The way to solve this (and to do such things in general) is to create a method that does the whole operation in a single transaction. Just create that method in a service class (any Spring-managed component will work) and annotate it with #Transactional as well.

I don't know Spring, but the JPA issue is that you are persisting a User that has a reference to a UserGroup, but JPA thinks the UserGroup is transient.
transient is one of the life-cycle states a JPA entity can be in. It means it's just created with the new operator, but has not been persisted yet (does not have a persistent identity yet).
Since you obtain your UserGroup instance via a DAO, it seems like something is wrong there. Your instance should not be transient, but detached. Can you print the Id of the UserGroup instance just after your received it from the DAO? And perhaps also show the findById implementation?
You don't have cascade persist on the group relation, so this normally should just work if the entity was indeed detached. Without a new entity, JPA simply has no way to set the FK correctly, since it would need the Id of the UserGroup instance here but that (seemingly) doesn't exist.
A merge should also not "overwrite" your detached entity. What is the exception that you're getting here?
I only partially agree with the answers being given by the others here about having to put everything in one transaction. Yes, this indeed may be more convenient as the UserGroup instance will still be 'attached', but it should not be -necessary-. JPA is perfectly capable of persisting new entities with references to either other new entities or existing (detached) entities that were obtained in another transaction. See e.g. JPA cascade persist and references to detached entities throws PersistentObjectException. Why?

I am not sure how but I've managed to solve this. The user group I was trying to assign the user to had NULL version field in database (the field annotated with #Version). I figured out it was an issue when I was testing GWT RequestFactory that was using this table. When I set the field to 1 everything started to work (no changes in transaction handling were needed).
If the NULL version field really caused the problem then this would be one of the most misleading exception messages I have ever got.