Merging necessary for detached association?

[vk101]

I have a conversation scoped entity that needs to be persisted. It has an association to a session-scoped entity loaded in a previous conversation, which is therefore a detached entity with respect to the current EntityManager.

Must I merge as follows?

sessionEntity = entityManager.merge(sessionEntity);
conversationEntity.setAssociation(sessionEntity);
entityManager.persist(conversationEntity);

Or is there any way to remove the initial merge? I don't care whether sessionEntity contains the most updated data from the database, I just want the foreign keys to be set up in the database correctly.

I don't want the merge to make an extra trip to the database. I tried doing an entityManager.getReference(SessionEntity.class, sessionEntityId), but that also seems to make a trip to the database.

I don't want to rewrite every query to use straight JDBC just so I avoid unnecessary trips to the database - how can I get around this issue?

[asookazian]

Honestly, I think you're the first person I've seen in this forum that is actually using an entity class with a non-default (i.e. non-conversation) scope.  That's not necessarily a bad thing but why are you using a session-scoped entity class?

Why don't you just outject a List<foo> as a result of a JPQL query or similar to session scope instead?

Are you using that entity class as a backing bean with a @Name annotation?

There is an example in SiA book (see Listing 4.1) with @Scope(ScopeType.EVENT) on an entity class.  Are you doing something similar?

[asookazian]

The booking example has a session-scoped entity class:

@Entity
@Name("user")
@Scope(SESSION)
@Table(name="Customer")
public class User implements Serializable
{...}

But it is being outjected to session scope in the AuthenticatorAction:

@Stateless
@Name("authenticator")
public class AuthenticatorAction 
    implements Authenticator
{
    @PersistenceContext 
    private EntityManager em;

    @In(required=false)   
    @Out(required=false, scope = SESSION)
    private User user;
   
    public boolean authenticate()
    {
     List results = em.createQuery("select u from User u where u.username=#{identity.username} and u.password=#{identity.password}")
                         .getResultList();
      
     if (results.size()==0) {
         return false;
     } else {
         user = (User) results.get(0);
         return true;
     }
    }
    
}

I'm not sure that the entity class needs to be session-scoped if the outjection to session scope is there...

[vk101]

The session-scoped entity, as in your example, is a User. However, I haven't defined the @Scope annotation on the entity - I've outjected the user to a session scope from an authentication method.

In cases where a session-scoped entity is an attribute of a conversation-scoped entity about to be persisted, I don't want to update the contents of the session-scoped entity from the database.

It seems the only way to do this would be to use straight JDBC.

I really hope there's a simple way to do what I'm trying using Seam and Hibernate.

[vk101]

Any Seam user who uses a session-scoped Member/User object would have come across this issue.

Either they're living with the inefficiency of a separate database access for the merge of the session-scoped Member/User, or they have found a way around it - if the latter, please share :)