Let's suppose every Product has a ProductCategory. Product categories very rarely change so I load those objects at startup from the database with JPA, detach them from their entity manager, cache them outside of JPA, then occasional re-use them in a read-only capacity on other entities. Older versions of OpenJPA seemed to simply skip over those detached entities while persisting the parent...in this example Product.ProductCategory would get skipped. Something changed (in WebSphere 7 to 8.5.5 if anyone cares about specifics) such that I now receive this error message:
<openjpa-2.2.2-r422266:1468616 fatal user error> org.apache.openjpa.persistence.InvalidStateException: Encountered unmanaged object "com.example.ProductCategory@166184d" in life cycle state unmanaged while cascading persistence via field "com.example.Product.productCategory" during flush. However, this field does not allow cascade persist. You cannot flush unmanaged objects or graphs that have persistent associations to unmanaged objects. Suggested actions: a) Set the cascade attribute for this field to CascadeType.PERSIST or CascadeType.ALL (JPA annotations) or "persist" or "all" (JPA orm.xml), b) enable cascade-persist globally, c) manually persist the related field value prior to flushing. d) if the reference belongs to another context, allow reference to it by setting StoreContext.setAllowReferenceToSiblingContext(). FailedObject: com.example.ProductCategory@166184d I don't want to persist the detached child field, nothing will ever change on it, and it doesn't belong to any entity manager scope. I want to ignore it when the main object is persisted. Why isn't there a CascadeType.IGNORE that I could place on Product.ProductCategory to have OpenJPA revert to the old behavior of skipping over the detached entity? Any ideas?
