Cascade – JPA & Hibernate annotation common mistake

Often times, developers are mix used the JPA and Hibernate annotation together, it will caused a very common mistake – JPA cascade type annotation is not working in Hibernate?

During the code review section, i find out many Java developers are not aware of this mistake and causing the program failed to execute the cascade operation to the related entities. I will take this one-to-many hibernate example for the demonstration.

Mistake

In the one-to-many example, many developers declared the JPA cascade options as following :

...
@Entity
@Table(name = "stock", catalog = "mkyong", uniqueConstraints = {
		@UniqueConstraint(columnNames = "STOCK_NAME"),
		@UniqueConstraint(columnNames = "STOCK_CODE") })
public class Stock implements java.io.Serializable {
    ...
    private Set<StockDailyRecord> stockDailyRecords = 
                                              new HashSet<StockDailyRecord>(0);
 
    @OneToMany(fetch = FetchType.LAZY, 
       cascade = {CascadeType.PERSIST,CascadeType.MERGE }, 
       mappedBy = "stock")
    public Set<StockDailyRecord> getStockDailyRecords() {
	return this.stockDailyRecords;
    }
 
    public void setStockDailyRecords(Set<StockDailyRecord> stockDailyRecords) {
	this.stockDailyRecords = stockDailyRecords;
    }
    ...

Save it with Hibernate session.

        stockDailyRecords.setStock(stock);        
        stock.getStockDailyRecords().add(stockDailyRecords);
 
        session.save(stock);
        session.getTransaction().commit();

What the code trying to do is when you save a “stock”, it will save the associated stockDailyRecords as well. Everything look fine, but THIS IS NOT WORKING, the cascade options will not execute and save the stockDailyRecords. Can you spot the mistake?

Explanation

Look in the code, @OneToMany is from JPA , it expected a JPA cascade – javax.persistence.CascadeType. However when you save it with Hibernate session, org.hibernate.engine.Cascade will do the following checking …

	if ( style.doCascade( action ) ) {
		cascadeProperty(
	          persister.getPropertyValue( parent, i, entityMode ),
		  types[i],
    	          style,
	          anything,
	          false
		);
	}

The Hibernate save process will causing a ACTION_SAVE_UPDATE action, but the JPA will pass a ACTION_PERSIST and ACTION_MERGE, it will not match and causing the cascade failed to execute.

@see source code

org.hibernate.engine.Cascade
org.hibernate.engine.CascadeStyle
org.hibernate.engine.CascadingAction

Solution

Delete the JPA cascade – javax.persistence.CascadeType, replace it with Hibernate cascade – org.hibernate.annotations.Cascade, with CascadeType.SAVE_UPDATE.

...
@Entity
@Table(name = "stock", catalog = "mkyong", uniqueConstraints = {
		@UniqueConstraint(columnNames = "STOCK_NAME"),
		@UniqueConstraint(columnNames = "STOCK_CODE") })
public class Stock implements java.io.Serializable {
    ...
    private Set<StockDailyRecord> stockDailyRecords = 
                                              new HashSet<StockDailyRecord>(0);
 
    @OneToMany(fetch = FetchType.LAZY, mappedBy = "stock")
    @Cascade({CascadeType.SAVE_UPDATE})
    public Set<StockDailyRecord> getStockDailyRecords() {
	return this.stockDailyRecords;
    }
 
    public void setStockDailyRecords(Set<StockDailyRecord> stockDailyRecords) {
	this.stockDailyRecords = stockDailyRecords;
    }
    ...

Now, it work as what you expected.

Conclusion

It look like an incompatible issue between JPA and Hibernate cascade annotation, if Hibernate is a JPA implementation, what may causing the misunderstand in between?