EntityManagerProvider vs. Provider of EntityManager
In guice-persist the EntityManager is bound in the injector allowing to directly inject an EntityManager into your classes. This causes for a lot of problems since the EntityManager has a life cycle. When a unit of work is started a new EntityManager instance is created. The thread which started the unit of work must use this instance and this instance alone to interact with the persistence unit. When the unit of work is ended the EntityManager is closed. This ends the life cycle of the EntityManager. All calls to the closed instance will result in an Exception (except isClosed() ).
People not familiar with the life cycle of the EntityManager tend to build a DAO or service like this:
public class ExampleService
{
private final EntityManager em;
@Inject
public ExamleService( EntityManager em )
{
this.em = em;
}
@Transactional
public Foo getFooByName( String name )
{
// retrieve foo from the DB using the EntityManager.
}
}The above implementation will always use the very same EntityManager for all threads and all calls to its methods. This won't work. To prevent injection of the EntityManager into a field or constructor Onami-Persist does not bind the EntityManager. Instead it binds an EntityManagerProvider. The EntityManagerProvider has only one method get() which returns the EntityManager. This EntityManager should be used by the calling thread to access the persistence unit.
EntityManagerProvider extends Provider<EntityManager>. If you need the EntityManager to be bound in the injector you can do this as follows:
public class MyPersistenceModule
extends PersistenceModule
{
@Override
protected void configurePersistence()
{
addApplicationManagedPersistenceUnit( "main" ).annotatedWith( MainPU.class );
bind( EntityManager.class )
.annotatedWith( MainPU.class )
.toProvider( Key.get( EntityManagerProvider.class, MainPU.class ) );
}
}