Question

Sorry for the noob question, but I’m having problems with JPA+Hibernate so I thought that something is not clear in my mind.
I have some entities, say A, B, C, D and I have coded AMethods, BMethods, CMethods, DMethods. Each of the *Methods classes contain EntityManager initialization via EntityManagerFactory and some methods that basically execute queries. I don’t know if I should use a singleton pattern (so that I have an EntityManager per *Method class) or if I need to open and close the EntityManager each time I execute a query or I persist/remove an entity… can you help me??

Answer 1

In a typical JPA/Hibernate application, you don’t put persistence logic in the entity classes themselves. This is a big change in design philosophy compared to older EJB 2.x applications. Instead, many applications create a layer of Data Access Objects–separate from the entities–that use EntityManager instances to query, load, and save entities. Often, these are singletons, and the entity manager instances inside the DAOs are local to the thread.

If you use a framework like Spring, the management of the EntityManager instances and transactions is completely automatic. Same with EJB 3, although I have not used that on a large project. I would suggest reading the Spring documentation’s chapter on Object-Relational Mapping data access. Even if you don’t end up using Spring in your application, the chapter gives some good tips on how to structure your application in a layered way that separates persistence concerns from the entities being persisted. Good luck!