Hibernate and Spring Data, reattach entity - spring

I am validating and uploading data in my webapp. In this process, I need to get user input, so the validating and uploading is split between 2 requests. In the 1st request I setup/fetch all the information and then save it in the session. This includes a Entity object that I later access in the 2nd request.
My question is how do I reattach the entity in the 2nd request so I don't get a LazyInitializationException? I have tried the following:
// we need to reattach the entities to the jpa session to avoid lazy-initialization exceptions
EntityManager manager = jpaContext.getEntityManagerByManagedType(myEntity.class);
manager.merge(myEntity);
I am getting the error: javax.persistence.TransactionRequiredException: No EntityManager with actual transaction available for current thread - cannot reliably process 'merge' call, even though I have the annotated the method with Spring's #Transactional.
These request method are Jersey REST service calls if that makes a difference. The jpa code lives in a commons jar file and this service is in the project that uses the commons jar.

Related

What can cause a LazyInitatializationException whereas Spring Open In View is enabled?

I am analysing a "classic" Hibernate error :
org.hibernate.LazyInitializationException : could not initialize proxy – no Session.
I am wondering how it could happen whereas the Spring Open In View mode is enabled?
If you have any documentation or knowledge on a possible reason, please share.
Thanks
Here are some feebacks on my context, and an example of what could cause LazyInitializationException event if Spring Open In View is enabled.
Context
My application is a REST API server developed with Spring Boot 2.5.3.
Spring Open In View is kept enabled by default.
A lot of Services are annotated with #Transactional methods.
Spring-data is used, and Entitymanager too, to create some native queries.
The error
One REST API request, that generates a lot requests to the database (both selections and insertions), fails with LazyInitializationException.
Debugging
By setting a breakpoint when LazyInitializationException is thrown, I discovered that the exception is thrown in org.hibernate.proxy.AbstractLazyInitializer#initialize, because the session is null. Then I discovered that the session is set to null, when the method EntityManager.clear is called. For any reason I don't know, this method was explicitely called in the code.
Fixing
So I just removed the call to EntityManager.clear, and the request works. I'm still wondering why previous developers wanted to clear the EntityManager, probably because they were confused with the transaction management.
Conclusion
Even in Spring Open In View is enabled, and as a result, event if a Hibernate Session is opened, calling EntityManager.clear unset the session to the entities loaded before. Then trying to access a Lazy Loaded field on those entities throws LazyInitializationException.
I hope this will help someone.
Here is the documentation from the latest hibernate version.
As you can see
Indicates an attempt to access not-yet-fetched data outside of a
session context. For example, when an uninitialized proxy or
collection is accessed after the session was closed.
Most probably somewhere you read some entity and then outside of a transaction you try to read some collection which was by default lazy loaded. So then another request needs to be done to database, but since you are out of transaction you receive this exception.
This usually occurs in case you load an entity without the annotation #Transactional or some other configuration to load it inside a transaction and then you give this to your controller to be returned to the user. Then the controller will use jackson or some other library to convert the entity object into a json and will try to read any field. At this point trying to read any lazy loaded collections from the entity, will result in this exception since the read will be outside of a transaction.

Struts 2 tomcat request/session contamination

I am using Struts 2 v 2.3.16.3 with tomcat 6.
A user will click on an action which finds an object by id and the page displays it. I have encountered a sporadic bug where the user will all of a sudden get the id of another lookup from another user on another machine. So effectively they are both calling the same action but passing different id to the request, but both end up viewing the same id.
This is obviously disastrous, and the data is totally corrupted as both users think they are editing a different record. Any ideas how make sure session/request activity is kept secure to each session?
I am also using spring and am using the #Transactional annotation in my Service layer, which returns the objects from the DAO. Is there something I need to do with this annotation to make it secure for each session ?
I am using org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateTransactionManager
Classic Thread-UnSafe problem.
Since you nominated Spring, my first guess is that you have not specified the right scope for your action beans in Spring xml configuration.
Be sure you are using scope="prototype" because otherwise the default scope of Spring is Singleton, and you don't want a single(ton) instance of an Action, that would not be ThreadLocal (and hence ThreadSafe) anymore.
If it is not that, it could be something on an Interceptor (that, differently from an action, is not Thread Safe), or you are using something static (in your Business / DAO layer, or in the Action itself) that should be not.

Spring annotation based configuration change

I have a spring MVC (3.1) web app using Hibernate that is all working correctly - today, I have tried to move the configuration completely over to annotation based config (only using xml for the security stuff that isnt yet supported by Spring in code config).
After some tuning I got the app starting with no errors and the home page loads correctly - however I am seeing some different behaviour with the Hibernate sessions - namely, I am getting the following error when loading a page that actually touches Hibernate entities:
org.hibernate.LazyInitializationException: failed to lazily initialize a collection of role: com.tmm.web.domain.Profile.connections, no session or session was closed
This is happening in the following scenario:
a request hits my #Controller and it loads the user Profile object
In the same method call (so we are not talking detached entities etc here) it tries to call profile.getConnections()
Profile.connections do not actually explicitly state a fetchtype, so should default to eager load (is my understanding?), but either way, the getConnections() call is directly after the loading of the profile - so would have thought even if it was being loaded lazily, it could easily just go back to the DB and load connections on demand.
//#Controller Code
Account viewedUser = accountService.loadAccountByUserName(userName);
model.put("viewedUserConnections", viewedUser.getUserProfile().getConnections());
//Profile Entity
#OneToMany(mappedBy = "user", cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
private List connections = new ArrayList();
Now, I know about lazy loading etc, so it's not a question about that - like i mentioned all the Hibernate stuff was working correctly - so really my question is, what Spring configuration might affect this behaviour?
I can post my before and after xml vs annotation config, but am hoping that someone can point me in the direction of some config that I might have missed in switching.
Your assumptions are mainly wrong:
In the same method call (so we are not talking detached entities etc here)
The method is a method of the controller. In typical Spring applications, controllers are not transactional, but services are. So, unless you configured an "open session in view" filter or interceptor, the session is closed when the transactional service method returns, and the controller thus always uses detached entities
Profile.connections do not actually explicitly state a fetchtype, so should default to eager load
No. XxxToMany associations are lazy by default.
If the same code worked before the transition, my guess is that you had an open session in view filter or interceptor, and that you forgot it when migrating to annotations.

Why am I getting a SpringFramework UnexpectedRollbackException?

I am getting the following Spring Framework error message:
Invocation of getLogoForGlobalConext() in class $Proxy44 threw exception
org.springframework.transaction.UnexpectedRollbackException:
Transaction rolled back because it has been marked as rollback-only
at template/includes/macros.vm line 1651, column 43
I opened macros.vm and looked up line 1651 and it looks like this:
#set ($globalLogo = $spaceManager.getLogoForGlobalContext());
From my research it looks like $Proxy44 is actually the $spaceManager variable (or an instance of DefaultSpaceManager.java).
This message appears randomly and when the web app tries to download an image/attachment sitting somewhere on the web server / database.
The attachmentmanager is governed by Spring's Transaction Management and the following transaction attributes are used when an image/attachment is downloaded:
propagation - for all methods in the attachment manager
propagation and read-only - for all methods in attachment manager starting with "get".
The attributes are defined in Spring Framework - Chapter 9. Transaction management.
What I am thinking is I need to set a timeout on the transactions (like set it to infinity).
It turns out one of the getter methods was performing a write to database. Specifically, it was updating the cache with some information every few minutes. When this update occurred, the UnexpectedRollbackException was thrown. Since this transaction is supposed to be "read only" as defined by the transaction attributes mentioned above, we are not allowed to perform updates during a getter operation.
I changed the getter method to not perform any updates to cache and to simply use the cache even if it expired, and the error goes away.
Hope this helps someone else.

EntityManager Lifecycle when using Oracle's Virtual Private Database

I had a few questions all related to the way an entity manager is created and used in an application with respect to Virtual Private Databases, which is a feature in Oracle DB which enables Row Level Security.
In a session bean, we generally have the entity manager as a member, and its generally injected by the container. How is this entity manager managed by the container - I mean, if we want to implement a Virtual Private Database then we have to make sure that the Virtual Private Database-context remains valid for the entire user session, and we do not have to set this context everytime before we fire a query. (to include more verbiage here : a session bean implements a couple of functions and each of these functions uses the same entity manager; now, it should not be the case that we set the Virtual Private Database everytime in each of these functions which do some DB manipulations).
Further to #1, since the entity manager is cached in the session bean, do we need to explicitly close the entity manager in any scenario? (like we do for JDBC connections?)
Also, I was wondering what should be the use case(or design criteria) for using a JTA or a non-JTA datasource. Is the way we create an entity manager dependant on this?
To add w.r.t the requirement on VPD:
It would be nice if the container managed EM can somehow be made to enforce the VPD per user. Note that EM is injected in here, so there should be a mechanism to set the VPD on the connection(and later retrieve the same connection for 'this' user in 'this' session).
Without an injected EM, i think using a reference to EMF and then setting the properties for the EM can be done. Something like :
((org.eclipse.persistence.internal.jpa.EntityManagerImpl)em.getDelegate()).setProperties
It would be an overkill, if the VPD is set everytime before the query is fired, rather the connection should 'maintain' the VPD context during the user's session and later release the connection (after clearing the VPD) back to the pool.
In a session bean, an injected entity manager is container managed and by default transaction scoped.
This means when you call any method on the session bean and a transaction is started, the persistence context of the entity manager starts. When the transaction is committed or rollbacked it ends. There is thus no scenario in which you have to explicitly close the entity manager.
Furthermore, when there already is a transaction in progress, this is joined by default and when there already is a persistence context attached to said transaction it's propagated instead of a new one being created.
Stateful session beans have another option, and that's the extended persistence context. This one is coupled to the scope of the stateful bean instead of to individual transactions. You still don't have to do any closing yourself here.
Then, you can also inject an EntityManagerFactory (using #PersistenceUnit) and then get an entity manager from it: In that case you'll have an application managed entity manager. In this case you'll have to explicitly close it.
JTA datasources (transactional datasources) are by default used with container managed entity managers. The container takes care of everything here. non-JTA datasources are for situations where you need separate connections to a DB, possibly outside any running transaction, on which you can set auto commit mode, commit, rollback, etc your self.
These two different datasource types can be defined in orm.xml for a persistence unit. If you define a persistence unit with a non-JTA datasource, you typically create an entity manager for it using a factory and then manage everything your self.
Update:
Regarding the Virtual Private Database, what you seem to need here is a user specific connection per entity manager, but the normal way of doing things is coupling a persistence unit to a general data source. I guess what could be needed here is a datasource that's aware of the user's context when a connection is requested.
If you completely bypass the container and even largely bypass the JPA abstraction, you could go directly to Hibernate. It has providers that you can register globally like DriverManagerConnectionProvider and DatasourceConnectionProvider. If you provide your own implementations for these with a setter for the actual connection, you can ask these back from a specific entity manager instance just prior to using it, and then set your own connection in it.
It's doable, but needless to say a bit hacky. Hopefully someone else can give a more 'official' answer. Best would of course if Oracle provided an official plug-in for e.g. EclipseLink to support this. This document hints that it does:
TopLink / EclipseLink : Support filtering data through their
#AdditionalCriteria annotation and XML. This allows an arbitrary JPQL
fragment to be appended to all queries for the entity. The fragment
can contain parameters that can be set through persistence unit or
context properties at runtime. Oracle VPD is also supported, include
Oracle proxy authentication and isolated data.
See also How to use EclipseLink JPA with Oracle Proxy Authentication.

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