JPA Entity Object Life Cycle

In this article, we will discuss the life cycle of JPA entity objects. Note that during the persistence process an object goes through lifecycle changes.
The life cycle of entity objects consists of four states: New, Managed, Removed, and Detached.
In the previous article, we have seen EntityManager Interface - an interface that provides the API necessary for managing the lifecycle of an entity. Using the methods of EntityManager, the application handles the relational database records as Java objects.
You may be interested to read JPA core interface articles:

JPA Entity Object Life Cycle

The below diagram illustrates the life cycle of JPA entity objects consisting of four states: New, Managed, Removed, and Detached.

New

When an entity object is initially created its state is New. In this state, the object is not yet associated with an EntityManager and has no representation in the database.
Example: In below example, the Employee instance is constructed as an ordinary Java object and its initial state is New. Note that the Employee instance is not yet associated with an EntityManager.
Employee employee = new Employee("ramesh", "Fadatare", "pune");

Managed

The managed state is maintained by below three methods:
1. EntityManager.persist(Entity object);
2. EntityManager.find(Long id);
3. Update Operation

1. EntityManager.persist() method

An entity object becomes Managed when it is persisted to the database via an EntityManager’s persist method, which must be invoked within an active transaction. On transaction commit, the owning EntityManager stores the new entity object to the database.
Example: The following code stores an instance of the Employee entity class in the database:
  Employee employee = new Employee("ramesh", "Fadatare", "pune");
  em.getTransaction().begin();
  em.persist(employee);
  em.getTransaction().commit();
The Employee instance is constructed as an ordinary Java object and its initial state is New. An explicit call to persist associates the object with an owner EntityManager em and changes its state to Managed
Note that the new entity object is stored in the database when the transaction is committed.

2. EntityManager.find() method

Entity objects retrieved from the database by an EntityManager are also in the Managed state.
Example: the following code fragment demonstrates the retrieval of an Employee object whose primary key is 1:
  Employee employee = em.find(Employee.class, 1);

3. Update Operation

If a managed entity object is modified within an active transaction the change is detected by the owning EntityManager and the update is propagated to the database on the transaction commit
Once an entity object is retrieved from the database (no matter which way) it can simply be modified in memory from inside an active transaction:
  Employee employee = em.find(Employee.class, 1);

  em.getTransaction().begin();
  employee.setNickname("Ram");
  em.getTransaction().commit();
The entity object is physically updated in the database when the transaction is committed. If the transaction is rolled back and not committed the update is discarded.

Removed

A managed entity object can also be retrieved from the database and marked for deletion, by using the EntityManager’s remove method within an active transaction. The entity object changes its state from Managed to Removed and is physically deleted from the database during commit.
Example: In order to delete an object from the database it has to first be retrieved (no matter which way) and then in an active transaction, it can be deleted using the remove method:
  Employee employee = em.find(Employee.class, 1);

  em.getTransaction().begin();
  em.remove(employee);
  em.getTransaction().commit();
Note: The entity object is physically deleted from the database when the transaction is committed. Embedded objects that are contained in the entity object are also deleted. If the transaction is rolled back and not committed the object is not deleted.

Detached

The last state, Detached, represents entity objects that have been disconnected from the EntityManager. For instance, all the managed objects of an EntityManager become detached when the EntityManager is closed. Working with detached objects, including merging them back to an EntityManager.
Example: The JPA 2 provides a detach() method to detach an entity object:
  em.detach(employee);

Conclusion

We have discussed the life cycle of JPA entity objects. The EntityManager provides methods like persist(), find(), remove(),close(),clear() etc to manage JPA entity life cycle. Read complete JPA specification at JPA Tutorial - Java Persistence API.

Comments

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