PersistentObjectException: detached entity passed to persist thrown by JPA and Hibernate

Question

I have a JPA-persisted object model that contains a many-to-one relationship: an Account has many Transactions. A Transaction has one

Answer 1

If nothing helps and you are still getting this exception, review your equals() methods - and don't include child collection in it. Especially if you have deep structure of embedded collections (e.g. A contains Bs, B contains Cs, etc.).

In example of Account -> Transactions:

  public class Account {

    private Long id;
    private String accountName;
    private Set transactions;

    @Override
    public boolean equals(Object obj) {
      if (this == obj)
        return true;
      if (obj == null)
        return false;
      if (!(obj instanceof Account))
        return false;
      Account other = (Account) obj;
      return Objects.equals(this.id, other.id)
          && Objects.equals(this.accountName, other.accountName)
          && Objects.equals(this.transactions, other.transactions); // <--- REMOVE THIS!
    }
  }

In above example remove transactions from equals() checks. This is because hibernate will imply that you are not trying to update old object, but you pass a new object to persist, whenever you change element on the child collection.
Of course this solutions will not fit all applications and you should carefully design what you want to include in the equals and hashCode methods.