JPA event listener is not called when saving collection of embeddables

Description

I have the following entity:

where the LocalizedValue is the following Embeddable:

When I change a simple property on the Product and merge it, then the JPA event listeners are called. However when I change the description and merge it, my JPA entity event listener is never called.

I will attach a failing test-case soon.

Linked issues

duplicates

HHH-4214

Execute the EJB 3.0 callback on collection change

HHH-4184

PostUpdate callback not called after update on a collection / association (@OneToMany for example)

relates to

HHH-8800

Hibernate 4.2.2 not validating entity upon insertion into its @OneToMany Collection

HHH-4992

Version is incremented when an inverse one-to-many collection is dirtied by adding or removing read-only entities

HHH-10404

Version is updated when a lazy, noop, inverse, one-to-many collection is mapped to an entity.

HHH-19131

Consider collections as entity data to trigger update listeners

Activity

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Vlad Mihalcea June 1, 2018 at 11:46 AM
Edited

I think that the JPA spec GitHub issue provides a lot of context for this issue.

1. The JPA spec is vague in this regard. Therefore, the spec should change to specify clearly if element collection changes should trigger a Pre/PostUpdate event.
2. I think it's much better if JPA defines a @Pre/PostCollectionPersist event listeners because, this way, we can differentiate between entity state changes and associated element collection changes. Grouping those together will make it hard figuring out what's changed.
3. With Hibernate, you already have a workaround since we define the Pre/PostCollectionUpdateEventListener.
4. You can achieve a similar goal, even without relying on Hibernate, by just using database triggers or CDC (e.g. Debezium).

For these reasons, I don't think we should change the current Hibernate behavior.

However, I won't close this issue since this is just my opinion and maybe someone else from the team has a different view on this subject.

Petar Tahchiev September 8, 2017 at 7:15 AM

Hi Andrea,
thank you for your comment. I have implemented this and it works. However, this looks like a Hibernate way only. Is it possible to achieve the same thing with JPA?