3.6. Modifying detached objects

Many applications need to retrieve an object in one transaction, send it to the presentation layer for manipulation, and later save the changes in a new transaction. There can be significant user think and waiting time between both transactions. Applications that use this kind of approach in a high-concurrency environment usually use versioned data to ensure isolation for the "long" unit of work.

The EJB3 specifications supports this development model by providing for persistence of modifications made to detached instances using the EntityManager.merge() method:

// in the first entity manager
Cat cat = firstEntityManager.find(Cat.class, catId);
Cat potentialMate = new Cat();
firstEntityManager.persist(potentialMate);

// in a higher layer of the application
cat.setMate(potentialMate);

// later, in a new entity manager
secondEntityManager.merge(cat);  // update cat
secondEntityManager.merge(mate); // update mate

The merge() method merges modifications made to the detached instance into the corresponding managed instance, if any, without consideration of the state of the persistence context. In other words, the merged objects state overrides the persistent entity state in the persistence context, if one is already present. The application should individually merge() detached instances reachable from the given detached instance if and only if it wants their state also to be persistent. This can be cascaded to associated entities and collections, using transitive persistence, see Section 3.10, “Transitive persistence”.