Should the id field of a JPA entity be considered in equals and hashCode?

Question

I hit a problem when writing tests for a database application using JPA2 and EclipseLink:

I add some entity to a database, retrieve it later and want to compare it to an

Answer 1

I would write my test to explicitly check for fields. To make this easy, before performing the assertEqual test, I will set the id of both the expected and actual result to the same predefined value and then use the normal equals method.

Removing ID from equals is not justifiable, just because testing is slightly difficult. You are foregoing serious performance benefits and also code integrity.