JPA entity persist not saving to DB

Question

EDIT So, I switched from Glassfish to Wildfly and was using EclipseLink 2.5. This code stopped working when I switched, with the below problems. The entity manager was created with resource local transactions for some reason.

I tried lots of things, but when I switched to Hibernate EM everything worked just fine. END EDIT

I'm using Wildfly 10 and Eclipselink JPA to have a simple Stateless EJB save a record to a database. The methods are here:

This bean is marked @Stateless

@POST
@Override
@Consumes({"application/xml", "application/json"})
public void create(Actor entity) {
    L.info("Creating {}", entity);
    super.create(entity);
    L.info("Created");
}

Here is the abstract parent's method:

public void create(T entity) {
    //getEntityManager().getTransaction().begin();
    getEntityManager().persist(entity);
    //getEntityManager().flush();
    //getEntityManager().getTransaction().commit();
}

If I uncomment the transactional code, it works.

If I add the transaction annotation, it does not work.

Like this, it does not work.

Why? I though EJBs got container managed transactions and that this should be auto-committed. Here is my persistence unit definition:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<persistence version="2.1" xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/persistence" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/persistence http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_2_1.xsd">
  <persistence-unit name="net.mikeski_auth_war_0.1.0-SNAPSHOTPU" transaction-type="JTA">
    <provider>org.eclipse.persistence.jpa.PersistenceProvider</provider>
    <jta-data-source>java:jboss/datasources/PostgresqlDS</jta-data-source>
    <class>entities.Actor</class>
    <exclude-unlisted-classes>true</exclude-unlisted-classes>
    <properties>
      <property name="eclipselink.weaving" value="false"/>
      <property name="eclipselink.weaving.fetchgroups" value="false"/>
      <property name="javax.persistence.schema-generation.database.action" value="create"/>
    </properties>
  </persistence-unit>
</persistence>

I know my entity is good because if I add some to the DB the find methods work, and if I get the transactions right the inserts work. What am I missing?

Answer 1

I would expect that you pass the object to a Stateless EJB, even if that EJB does nothing more than call em.persist for you. Here you are mixing functionalities, you are making the REST do the EJB's work and there may be things that you (and I) don't fully understand yet. Further, the service layer stateless ejb would presumably have other functions in it, so it's certainly not a waste.

@Inject ActorService actorService;

@POST
@Consumes({"application/xml", "application/json"})
public void create(Actor entity) {
    L.info("Creating {}", entity);
    actorService.create(entity);
    L.info("Created");
}

and, presumably:

@Stateless
public class ActorService {
    @Inject private EntityManager em;

    public create(Actor actor) {
        em.persist(actor);
    }
    .. the rest of the actor service layer
}

I think it's more important to understand the expected way to do things than to understand why the unusual isn't working.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I think injecting the entityManager inside the bean class marked with @Stateless should work.

If you are getting entitymanager in some other class (parent class) try getting it from entityManagerFactory instead of directly injecting it. Are you already doing that in the super class or do you have a getter for injected em.

There could be java ee version issue as discussed in an answer here I think that answer should be helpful.

As such, I agree with Nicholas's inputs about separating responsibilities.