EntityManager.persist: ¿What does/should it mean?

Lets say you are presented with the following JPA @Entity:

@Entity
public class Customer {   
  private Long id;
private String name;
  @Id
@GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.AUTO)
public Long getId() {
    return id;
}   
  public void setId(Long id) {
    this.id = id;
}
  @Column(nullable=false)
public String getName() {
    return name;
}   
  public void setName(String name) {
    this.name = name;
}
}
 

And then the following test

   @Test
public void persistCustomerInTransaction() throws Exception {
    factory = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory(PERSISTENCE_UNIT_NAME);
      EntityManager em = factory.createEntityManager();
      em.getTransaction().begin();
      Customer customer = new Customer();
      em.persist(customer);em.getTransaction().commit();
      em.close();   
  }

And the following question: Where does it crash?:

1. At the line em.persist(customer); because the name is configured as nullable=false, and we are trying to persist the Customer instance with a null value in the name property



2. em.getTransaction().commit(); because the name is configured as nullable=false, and we are trying to commit the transaction with a null value in the name property

Turns out… that the answer depends on the JPA provider you are using!!!! If using Hibernate, it crashes at em.persist, but if using EclipseLink, it crashes at em.getTransaction().commit.

Now, this might seem irrelevant, but it is in fact very important, because EclipseLink behavior means that constraint validations are deferred until the point where the transaction is committed, and that means that the developer has a lot more freedom to manipulate its persistent objects: they can be in any (possibly invalid) state while they are being manipulated by the business logic of the application, and they only have to be “right” the moment one needs to commit them to the database (not before), this is specially useful, for example, when building a wizard like UI (or a plain simple CRUD UI with support for full object graphs) with EclipseLink, I can persist my objects as soon as I want, and if want to, for example, run some validation logic at the end, all I have to do is ask the EclipseLink to give a list of all the objects that are going to be written in to the database, with Hibernate, the entityManager does not help me manage new object instances, I have to manage them myself.

What I find really surprising is that AFAIK there should be some kind of test to ensure that all JPA are compatible (something called the TCK?), and I think that this kind of discrepancy should be detected by those tests... shouldn't it?


I think this support for deferred validation, and an API to get will be inserted, will be updated or will be deleted, will be very important to really integrate JPA with something like JSR 330, so that validation can really integrate with the lifecycle of a persistent POJO.