Question

Ok, I was using EJB 3.0 with hibernate, we dropped our .ear file into Easy-Beans 1.0.1 (with Hibernate) deploy directory embedded into Apache Tomcat 6.0.18.
So my database had to persist things like this:

@Entity
@Table(name="AUTHOR")
public class Author implements Serializable {

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Fields
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

@Id
@GeneratedValue(strategy = IDENTITY)
@Column(name = "A_ID", unique=true, nullable = false)
private Integer id;

@Column (name = "A_NAME", unique = false, nullable = false)
private String name;

@Column (name = "A_LASTNAME", unique = false, nullable = false)
private String lastname;

@OneToMany(cascade = {ALL}, fetch = EAGER, mappedBy = "author")
private Set<BookAuthor> bookAuthors = new HashSet<BookAuthor>();

  @Override
  public boolean equals(Object o) {
      if (this == o) return true;
      if (o == null || getClass() != o.getClass()) return false;

      Author author = (Author) o;

      if (id != null ? !id.equals(author.id) : author.id != null) return false;

      return true;
  }

  @Override
  public int hashCode() {
      return id != null ? id.hashCode() : 0;
  }  
}

@Entity
@Table(name = "BOOK" )
public class Book implements Serializable {
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Fields
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
@Id
@GeneratedValue (strategy = IDENTITY)
@Column(name = "B_ID", unique = true, nullable = false)
private Integer bid;

@Column(name = "B_YEAR", unique = false, nullable = true)
private Integer year;

@Column(name = "B_ISBN", unique = false, nullable = false)
private String isbn;

@Column(name = "B_TITLE", unique = false, nullable = false)
private String title;

@OneToMany(cascade = {ALL}, fetch = EAGER, mappedBy = "book")
private Set<BookAuthor> bookAuthors = new HashSet<BookAuthor>();

  @Override
  public boolean equals(Object o) {
    if (this == o) return true;
    if (o == null || getClass() != o.getClass()) return false;

    Book book = (Book) o;

    if (isbn != null ? !isbn.equals(book.isbn) : book.isbn != null) return false;
    if (bid != null ? !kid.equals(book.bid) : book.bid != null) return false;

    return true;
  }

  @Override
  public int hashCode() {
    int result = bid != null ? bid.hashCode() : 0;
    result = 31 * result + (isbn != null ? isbn.hashCode() : 0);
    return result;
  }

}

@Entity
@Table(name = "BOOK_AUTHOR")
public class BookAuthor implements Serializable {

  //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
  // Fields
  //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
  @Id
  @GeneratedValue(strategy = IDENTITY)
  @Column(name = "BA_ID", unique=true, nullable = false)
  private Integer id;

  @Column(name = "BA_ROLE", unique = false, nullable = true)
  private String role;

  @ManyToOne
  @JoinColumn (name = "A_ID", referencedColumnName = "A_ID", nullable = false)
  private Author author;

  @ManyToOne
  @JoinColumn (name = "B_ID", referencedColumnName = "B_ID", nullable = false)
  private Book book;

  @Override
  public boolean equals(Object o) {
    if (this == o) return true;
    if (o == null || getClass() != o.getClass()) return false;

    BookAuthor that = (BookAuthor) o;

    if (auhtor != null ? !author.equals(that.author) : that.author != null) return false;
    if (book != null ? !book.equals(that.book) : that.book!= null) return false;
    if (id != null ? !id.equals(that.id) : that.id != null) return false;

    return true;
  }

  @Override
  public int hashCode() {
    int result = id != null ? id.hashCode() : 0;
    result = 31 * result + (author != null ? author.hashCode() : 0);
    result = 31 * result + (book != null ? book.hashCode() : 0);
    return result;
  }

}

So when removing items I had an entity bean that went something like this:

@Stateless
@Local(DeleteBookAuthor.class)
public class DeleteBookAuthorBean implements DeleteBookAuthor
{

   @PersistenceContext(unitName="Library")
   protected EntityManager em;

   @Override
   public void removeById(Integer id) {
      try{

        Query q = em.createQuery("SELECT ba FROM BookAuthor ba WHERE id = ?1");
        q.setParameter(1,id);

        BookAuthor ba = (BookAuthor) q.getSingleResult();

        ba.getAuthor().getBookAuthors().remove(ba);
        ba.getBook().getBookAuthors().remove(ba);

        em.remove(ba);
      }catch (Exception e){
         e.printStackTrace();
      }
   }
}

Unfortunatelly, when my Servlet calls this bean it returns a “deleted entity passed to persist” exception; However changing the lines:

Query q = em.createQuery("SELECT ba FROM BookAuthor ba WHERE id = ?1");
q.setParameter(1,id);        
BookAuthor ba = (BookAuthor) q.getSingleResult(); 

to

BookAuthor ba = em.find(BookAuthor.class, id)

makes the problem go away. The question I ask is why? In a similar situation I used em.createQuery to retrieve and delete muliple entities and it worked without a hitch. So why won’t it work now?

UPDATE: Calling
Query q=... and then removing the BookAuthors removes the BookAuthors from Books but not from the Authors. In second case it is removed from both sets. Both ba have same hash and return true when compared using baQuery.equals(baFind) .

Any clarifications why two functions would return same object but calling remove would behave differently depending on whether query/find is called?

Answer 1

Perhaps it’s related to the lack of equals()/hashCode() in BookAuthor. If so, it looks like in the case of query you have several different instances of BookAuthor with the same state, so they are not removed from the corresponding sets in Author and Book.