Question

I have a Spring / Hibernate project and I am trying to store a date into the database but it’s not working. It must be something stupid but I have no idea what I am doing wrong.

Here is my code:

user.setFailedPasswordAnswerAttemptCount(0);
user.setLastLoginDate(new Date());
user.setIsOnline(true);

The other two variables (failedPasswordAnswerAttemptCount and isOnline) are getting written to the database without issue. I have also tried it with just passing a java.util.Date instead of a java.sql.Timestamp…same result. Here is how the property is defined on the user object:

private Date lastLoginDate;

@Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)
@Column(name="last_login_date")
public Date getLastLoginDate() {
    return this.lastLoginDate;
}

public void setLastLoginDate(Date lastLoginDate) {
    this.lastLoginDate = lastLoginDate;
}

Here is the column definition:

`last_login_date` datetime DEFAULT NULL

Any help? I don’t even know what else to look for as this should be working.

Some more detail about the error: No errors or strange messages in the hibernate log. The hibernate log is showing a parameterized query but it isn’t telling me what it is actually writing. It looks like it’s not updating the column at all. In other words, if there is already a date there it doesn’t change, or if it is null it doesn’t change.

Update: I have looked at the logs and it looks like hibernate does write the proper data, but then immediately writes the incorrect data again. I see the following entry in the log:

11:15:12.280 [http-bio-8080-exec-26] TRACE o.h.e.def.AbstractSaveEventListener - detached instance of: com.hi.model.User
11:15:12.280 [http-bio-8080-exec-26] TRACE o.h.e.def.DefaultMergeEventListener - merging detached instance

And right after that I see it putting the old value back in for the lastLoginDate.

Answer 1

I found the problem. I am refactoring some code and it looks like I was doing this:

//get user object
User user = getUser();
//call a function which modifies user
functionModifiesUser();
//modify user
user.blah = blah;
entityManager.merge(user);

So the parent function had a stale copy of the user object when I tried to save it. Actually, removing the merge statement was enough to fix it. But I have refactored the code to put all this in one place.