Java Persistence API (JPA)

Elastic Path uses the Apache OpenJPA implementation of the Java Persistence API (JPA) to store and retrieve information from its databases.

JPA provides the following features:

• Supports a POJO (Plain Old Java Object) persistence model
• Rich inheritance support
• Support for annotations or XML based mapping files
• Supports pluggable persistence providers
• Is supported by Spring
• Supports native SQL (Structured Query Language) queries as well as the JPQL (Java Persistence Query Language)

Entities and Identities

Entity Characteristics

A JPA Entity is a class which represents persistent data stored in a database.

In most cases a concrete or an abstract class can be an Entity. Entity classes support mixed inheritance: the superclass and/or subclass of an Entity does not have to be an Entity.

Any application-defined object with the following characteristics can be an Entity:

• It can be made persistent
• It has a persistent identity (i.e. a unique key)
• It is not a primitive, a primitive wrapper of build-in object

Entity Identification

All Entities must have a persistent id (i.e. a database primary key). This is known as the entity identity (or persistence identity). JPA supports the following entity identities:

• Single field identity (like our long uidPk field)
• Composite primary keys (provided by an Identity class)

The Entity identity must be defined on the root entity or mapped superclass of the hierarchy. Elastic Path’s domain model defines the uidPk on the Persistable interface. Persistable classes need to implement the getUidPk() method with the @Id annotation and setUidPk() method.

JPA supports several strategies for primary key generation:

• Auto - leave the decision up to the JPA implementation
• Identity - the database will assign an identity value on insert
• Sequence - use a datastore sequence to generate a value
• Table - use a sequence table to generate a field value

Elastic Path’s domain model uses the Table generator. Table works with all databases, and offers the best overall performance. Elastic Path’s persistence classes defines the generator table JPA_GENERATED_KEYS with the columns ID and LAST_VALUE, a name and primary key value matching the name of the database table that the class will be persisted to. JPA uses this table to keep track of the last identifier value used to ensure the next one used is unique. You can configure the number of values to allocate in memory for each trip to the database (the default is 50). Allocating values in memory allows the JPA runtime to avoid accessing the database for every sequence request.

The annotations on the getUidPk() method are as follows:

@Id
@Column(name = "UIDPK")
@GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.TABLE, generator = TABLE_NAME)
@TableGenerator(name = TABLE_NAME, table = "JPA_GENERATED_KEYS",
    pkColumnName = "ID", valueColumnName = "LAST_VALUE", pkColumnValue = TABLE_NAME)

Packaging

JPA requires one XML file, META-INF/jpa-persistence.xml, which does the following:

• Defines the name of the persistence unit
• Defines the transaction strategy
• Identifies the entities contained within a persistence unit
• Defines persistence provider configuration

It can also define the location of XML mapping files.

Below is a sample META-INF/jpa-persistence.xml file. It does the following:

• Defines a persistence unit named myopenjpa
• Identifies the provider as OpenJPA (org.apache.openjpa.persistence.PersistenceProviderImpl)
• Lists the classes contained in the persistence unit
• Sets the connection factory to java:comp/env/jdbc/epjndi

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<persistence xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence
          http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_1_0.xsd"
    version="1.0">

  <persistence-unit name="myopenjpa">

    <provider>org.apache.openjpa.persistence.PersistenceProviderImpl</provider>

    <class>com.elasticpath.domain.catalog.impl.AbstractPriceImpl</class>
    <class>com.elasticpath.domain.catalog.impl.BrandImpl</class>
    <class>com.elasticpath.domain.catalog.impl.CategoryImpl</class>
    <class>com.elasticpath.domain.catalog.impl.CategoryTypeImpl</class>
    <class>com.elasticpath.domain.catalog.impl.InventoryImpl</class>
    <class>com.elasticpath.domain.catalog.impl.ProductAssociationImpl</class>
    <class>com.elasticpath.domain.catalog.impl.ProductCategoryImpl</class>
    <class>com.elasticpath.domain.catalog.impl.ProductImpl</class>
    <class>com.elasticpath.domain.catalog.impl.ProductSkuImpl</class>
    <class>com.elasticpath.domain.catalog.impl.ProductTypeImpl</class>

    ...

    <properties>
      <property name="openjpa.ConnectionFactoryName"
                value="java:comp/env/jdbc/epjndi"/>
    </properties>

  </persistence-unit>

</persistence>

OpenJPA Properties

In the <properties> element of jpa-persistence.xml, you can set a number of different properties. By default, Elastic Path sets the following:

<!-- core/ep-core/src/main/resources/META-INF/jpa-persistence.xml -->

<properties>
    <property name="openjpa.DataCacheManager" value="ehcache" />
    <property name="openjpa.ConnectionFactoryName" value="java:comp/env/jdbc/epjndi"/>
    <property name="openjpa.Log" value="slf4j"/>
    <property name="openjpa.ConnectionFactoryProperties" value="PrettyPrint=true, PrettyPrintLineLength=120, PrintParameters=true"/>
    <property name="openjpa.jdbc.EagerFetchMode" value="parallel"/>
    <property name="openjpa.jdbc.SubclassFetchMode" value="parallel"/>
    <property name="openjpa.DetachState" value="loaded(DetachedStateField=true,AccessUnloaded=false)"/>
    <property name="openjpa.Multithreaded" value="true"/>
    <property name="openjpa.AutoDetach" value="close, commit, nontx-read"/>
    <property name="openjpa.jdbc.DBDictionary" value="batchLimit=100, SupportsSubselect=true, SupportsCorrelatedSubselect=false"/>
    <property name="openjpa.jdbc.TransactionIsolation" value="read-committed"/>

    <!-- Uncomment the section below to enable data caching, comment them out to disable -->
    <property name="openjpa.DataCache" value="true"/>
    <property name="openjpa.RemoteCommitProvider" value="sjvm"/>
    <property name="openjpa.QueryCompilationCache" value="true(cacheSize=5000,softReferenceSize=0)"/>
    <property name="openjpa.jdbc.FinderCache" value="false"/>

    <property name="openjpa.QueryCache" value="false"/>
    <property name="openjpa.jdbc.QuerySQLCache" value="false"/>

    <!-- OpenJPA 2.x compatibility against spec -->
    <property name="openjpa.Compatibility"
            value="convertPositionalParametersToNamed=true,ignoreDetachedStateFieldForProxySerialization=true"/>

    <!-- Pre-Load Metadata -->
    <property name="openjpa.MetaDataRepository" value="Preload=true"/>
</properties>

The following list gives a brief summary of OpenJPA properties and their purposes:

• ConnectionFactoryName

  Tells OpenJPA the JNDI location of the Datasource file.

• Log

  Tells OpenJPA which logging library to use for issuing log messages.

• ConnectionFactoryProperties

  This is used to format the log output of SQL debug messages to a more readable form.

• EagerFetchMode

  Set to "parallel", the most efficient eager fetch mode for Elastic Path’s domain model.

• SubclassFetchMode

  Set to "parallel" , the most efficient eager fetch mode for Elastic Path’s domain model.

• DetachState

  Tells OpenJPA to take advantage of a detached state field to make the attach process more efficient. This field is added by the enhancer and is not visible to your application. The loaded value tells OpenJPA to detach all fields and relations that are already loaded, but not to include unloaded fields in the detached graph.

  Setting DetachedStateField to true tells OpenJPA to use a non-transient detached state field so that objects crossing serialization barriers can still be attached efficiently. This requires, however, that your client tier have the enhanced versions of your classes and the OpenJPA libraries.

• Multithreaded

  Tells OpenJPA that persistent instances and OpenJPA components other than the EntityManagerFactory will be accessed by multiple threads at once.

• AutoDetatch

  Tells OpenJPA to detach entities on transaction commits, instances are read non-transactionally, or when the OpenJPA interface closes.

• DBDictionary

  Provides additional database parameters. The batchLimit parameter groups multiple insert and delete operations into a single SQL query to optimize performance. The SupportsSubselect and SupportsCorrelatedSubselect parameters instruct OpenJPA to support subselects in queries, but not correlated subselects.

• TransactionIsolation

  Ensures the database transaction isolation level is set to READ_COMMITTED.

• DataCache

  Enables OpenJPA data caching.

• DataCacheManager

  Tells OpenJPA to use Ehcache as its data cache provider.

• RemoteCommitProvider

  Sets OpenJPA to use a single JVM (Java Virtual Machine).

• QueryCompilationCache

  Tells OpenJPA to cache parsed query strings. As a result, most queries are only parsed once in OpenJPA, and cached thereafter.

• FinderCache

  Tells OpenJPA not to use the FinderCache. The FinderCache currently has a bug which causes data corruption issues and must be disabled.

• QueryCache

  Tells OpenJPA to cache the object ids returned by query executions.

• QuerySQLCache

  Set to false so that OpenJPA does not cache the SQL queries it generates.

• Compatibility

  Tells OpenJPA to convert positional parameters to named parameters to support mixed queries, as well as to use OpenJPA 1 behaviour for Detached state serialization.

• MetaDataRepository

  Tells OpenJPA to preload the metadata repository as a runtime performance optimization

Class Enhancement

OpenJPA uses an enhancer to provide optimal runtime performance, flexible lazy loading, and efficient immediate dirty tracking. The enhancer post-processes the bytecode generated by your Java compiler for your domain classes, adding the necessary fields and methods to implement the required persistence features. This bytecode modification perfectly preserves the line numbers in stack traces and is compatible with Java debuggers.

Annotations

Most annotations are placed directly into the class files of the objects to be persisted. This makes it easy to maintain consistency between the objects and their persistence definition: there is no need to go find the "mapping file". Annotations are generally quicker to type than XML mapping definitions and IDEs support annotations including syntax checking and auto-completion. The exception to the rule is annotations that define named queries (see below).

Annotations can be at the field level, where the persistence layer writes directly to the field, or at the property level, where the persistence layer uses the getter and setter methods. You cannot mix field and property level annotations within the same class hierarchy.

As a standard, our object model uses property level annotations. The annotations in the class files are written above the getter method for each property.

Read the full documentation

The OpenJPA User’s Guide contains comprehensive documentation on all of the annotations available along with what parameters they take. You will need to refer to this often when doing your own mappings.

Simple annotations

Here’s a list of some of the more common simple annotations:

• @Entity

  Denotes an entity class.

• @Table(name = "tablename")

  Denotes that the entity should persist to the tablename table in the schema.

• @Id

  Denotes a simple identity field.

• @Basic

  Denotes a simple value that should be persisted as-is.

• @Column(name = "columnname")

  Denotes that the value should be persisted to the columnname column in the schema.

• @Temporal

  Defines how to use Date fields at the JDBC level.

• @Enumerated

  Controls how Enum fields are mapped.

• @Transient

  Specifies that a field is non-persistent

Note that properties in a class defined as an Entity that do not have any annotations may still be treated as persistable depending on the type. To avoid any confusion, ensure you annotate all property getters including @Basic and @Transient properties.

Relationship management

The following lists of some of the annotations commonly used for mapping relationships in JPA:

• @OneToOne

  When an entity A references a single entity B, and no other A's can reference the same B, there is a one to one relationship between A and B.

• @OneToMany

  When an entity A references multiple B entities, and no two A's reference the same B, there is a one to many relationship from A to B.

• @ManyToOne

  When an entity A references a single entity B, and other A's might also reference the same B, there is a many to one relationship from A to B.

• @ManyToMany

  When an entity A references multiple B entities, and other A's might reference some of the same B's, there is a many to many relationship between A and B .

• @Embedded

  Embedded fields are mapped as part of the datastore record of the declaring entity. A class can be marked as embeddable by adding the @Embeddable annotation to the class

Inheritance

JPA provides two annotations for supporting inheritance:

• @MappedSuperclass

  A non-entity class that can define persistent state and mapping information for entity subclasses. Mapped superclasses are usually abstract.

  Unlike true entities, you cannot query a mapped superclass, pass a mapped superclass instance to any EntityManager or Query methods, or declare a persistent relation with a mapped superclass target.

• @Inheritance

  Indicates the inheritance the strategy for a hierarchy of entities. There are 3 strategies to chose from:

  • SINGLE_TABLE

    Maps all classes in the hierarchy to the base class’ table.

  • JOINED

    Uses a different table for each class in the hierarchy. Each table only includes state declared in its class. Thus to load a subclass instance, the JPA implementation must read from the subclass table as well as the table of each ancestor class, up to the base entity class.

  • TABLE_PER_CLASS

    Uses a different table for each class in the hierarchy. Unlike the JOINED strategy, however, each table includes all state for an instance of the corresponding class. To load a subclass instance, the JPA implementation must only read from the subclass table; it does not need to join to superclass tables

OpenJPA-specific annotations

OpenJPA provides some useful annotations in addition to those provided by the JPA specification. Many of these are used by Elastic Path due to the complexity of the domain object model. Commonly used OpenJPA-specific are as follows:

• @ForeignKey

  Defines a foreign key. This annotation is present when there is a database foreign key, and allows OpenJPA to calculate the correct order to issue database statements without violating key constraints.

• @Dependent

  Marks a direct relation as dependent. This means the referenced object is deleted whenever the owning object is deleted, or whenever the relation is severed by nulling or resetting the owning field.

• @ElementJoinColumn

  Array, collection, or map element join column.

• @ElementForeignKey

  Defines a foreign key constraint to the columns of a collection element.

• @ElementDependent

  Marks the entity elements of a collection, array, or map field as dependent. This means the referenced object is deleted whenever the owning object is deleted, or whenever the relation is severed by nulling or resetting the owning field.

• @Factory

  Contains the name of a method that will be invoked to instantiate the field from the external form stored in the database.

• @Externalizer

  Sets the name of a method that will be invoked to convert the field into its external form for database storage.

• @DataCache

  If @DataCache(enabled = false) is present, then the entity will not be cached. All other combinations will enable caching, assuming that openjpa.DataCache = true in the jpa-persistence.xml file of the entity

Example Annotations

@Entity
@Table(name = "TPRODUCT")
public class ProductImpl extends AbstractEntityImpl implements Product {

  ...

  @Basic
  @Column(name = "START_DATE")
  public Date getStartDate() {
    return this.startDate;
  }

  @Version
  @Column(name = "LAST_MODIFIED_DATE")
  @Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)
  public Date getLastModifiedDate() {
    return lastModifiedDate;
  }

  @ManyToOne(targetEntity = ProductTypeImpl.class)
  @JoinColumn(name = "PRODUCT_TYPE_UID")
  public ProductType getProductType() {
    return this.productType;
  }

  @Transient
  public ProductSku getDefaultSku() {
    if (defaultSku == null && productSkus != null && productSkus.size() > 0) {
      return (ProductSku) productSkus.values().iterator().next();
    }
    return defaultSku;
  }

  @OneToMany(targetEntity = ProductPriceImpl.class,
             cascade = { CascadeType.PERSIST, CascadeType.REMOVE })
  @MapKey(name = "currencyCode")
  @ElementJoinColumn(name = "PRODUCT_UID")
  public Map getProductPrices() {
    return productPrices;
  }

  ...

}

Java Persistence Query Language (JPQL)

JPQL executes over the abstract persistence schema (the entities you’ve created) defined by your persistence unit, rather than over the database like traditional SQL. JPQL supports a SQL-like syntax, and dynamic and static (named) queries.

Below is an example of a JPQL query:

SELECT [PD:<result>]
    [PD:FROM <candidate-class(es)>]
    [PD:WHERE <filter>]
    [PD:GROUP BY <grouping>]
    [PD:HAVING <having>]
    [PD:ORDER BY <ordering>]

Query basics

Below is a simple query for all CategoryTypeImpl entities:

SELECT ct FROM CategoryTypeImpl ct

The optional where clause places criteria on matching results, for example:

SELECT j FROM ImportJobImpl j WHERE j.name = '01-SnapItUp'

You can also specify parameters, for example:

SELECT c FROM CategoryImpl c WHERE c.code = ?1

Fetch Joins

JPQL queries may specify one or more join fetch declarations, which allow the query to specify which fields in the returned instances will be pre-fetched

SELECT ct FROM CategoryTypeImpl ct JOIN FETCH ct.categoryAttributeGroupAttributes

Multiple fields may be specified in separate join fetch declarations. You may want to use other join types depending on the data, e.g. left outer join fetch.

Named Queries

JPA supports named queries. While named queries can be defined in the annotations of a class – usually the class in which the named query is most relevant – they can also be defined external to the implementation class source files in XML files. In this case, each Java package has its own named queries XML file in the following location: META-INF/ <packagename>-orm.xml. This is useful for keeping all the named queries specific to a package in the same place while allowing easier extensibility, so that queries can be modified without requiring the application to be recompiled.

Here is an example of named queries in an XML file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<entity-mappings xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/orm"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/orm http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/orm_1_0.xsd"
    version="1.0">
    <package>com.elasticpath.domain.customer.impl</package>
    <entity class="CustomerDeletedImpl">
        <named-query name="CUSTOMER_UIDS_SELECT_BY_DELETED_DATE">
            <query>select pd.customerUid from CustomerDeletedImpl as pd where pd.deletedDate &gt;= ?1</query>
        </named-query>
    </entity>
    <entity class="CustomerGroupImpl">
        <named-query name="CUSTOMERGROUP_SELECT_ALL">
            <query>select cg from CustomerGroupImpl cg</query>
        </named-query>
        <named-query name="CUSTOMERGROUP_FIND_BY_NAME">
            <query>select cg from CustomerGroupImpl cg where cg.name = ?1</query>
        </named-query>
    </entity>
</entity-mappings>

Persistence coding

Entity Manager

One of the key interfaces in the Java Persistence API is the EntityManager. Similar to Hibernate’s Session interface, this interface provides services for CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) operations, creating query instances, and interfacing to the transaction API. This interface includes operations, such as persist, remove, find, or merge.

Spring Integration

Spring provides JPA integration, implementing JPA Container responsibilities. It includes beans like LocalEntityManagerFactoryBean which make it easy to configure the Entity Manager Factory through Spring configuration files, and SharedEntityManagerBean which provides a shared EntityManager reference.

Core Engine Persistence model integration

Elastic Path integrates JPA with its core persistence model. In general, Elastic Path uses Spring Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection when possible.

Elastic Path provides the following classes for persistence. You can find these in the com.elasticpath.persistence.openjpa.impl package of ep-persistence-openjpa.

JpaPersistenceEngineImpl

Implements Core Interface: PersistenceEngine

The main persistence engine class. This is what you would set as the persistenceEngine property in your Spring configuration files for the service beans.

This class uses a shared EntityManager provided by the Spring configuration.

JpaSessionImpl

Implements Core Interface: PersistenceSession

This is used by code such as the Import Manager which uses the PersistenceSession interface to run queries on the session in a transaction under its control.

This class uses the EntityManager methods directly.

JpaQueryImpl

Implements Core Interface: Query

This is used by code such as the Import Manager which uses the Query interface to manipulate queries within its own transaction.

This class uses the javax.persistence.Query methods directly.

JpaTransactionImpl

Implements Core Interface: Transaction

This is used by code such as the Import Manager which uses the Transaction interface to control its own transactions.

This class uses the EntityTransaction methods directly.

The majority of the time you’ll just use the persistence-api PersistenceEngine interface, and configure Spring to inject the JPA implementation, so your code generally doesn’t need to know anything about JPA.

Eager vs. Lazy loading

You can define fields to load lazily or eagerly the annotations. Be aware that using eager loading for everything can seriously affect performance and is unnecessary in cases when you don’t need every linked object.

Lazy loading will defer loading of a field’s associated entity until it is accessed, but it must be accessed while the connection is still open. Trying to access that field after the connection is closed will throw a IllegalStateException.

Best practice is to define all (non-basic) fields as lazy loading (the default for @OneToMany and @ManyToMany mappings) and then define named queries with fetch join to eagerly load the relation fields. When you need just the basic data you use a query without the fetch join and when you need everything you use the fetch join query.

For example, the following named query should be used when you want basic Category information:

@NamedQuery(name = "CATEGORY_SELECT_BY_GUID",
    query = "SELECT c FROM CategoryImpl c WHERE c.code = ?1")

Whereas when you require all locale dependent fields and attributes, use the following:

@NamedQuery(name = "CATEGORY_SELECT_BY_GUID_EAGER",
    query = "SELECT c FROM CategoryImpl c "
        + "LEFT OUTER JOIN FETCH c.localeDependantFieldsMap "
        + "LEFT OUTER JOIN FETCH c.attributeValueMap "
        + "WHERE c.code = ?1")

Fetch Groups

OpenJPA provides the concept of Fetch Groups - sets of fields that load together. They can be used to pool together associated fields in order to provide performance improvements over standard data fetching. Specifying fetch groups allows for tuning of lazy loading and eager fetching behavior. Fetch groups are used in our system for objects that are indexed by our Search Server to define exactly what fields need to be loaded by the indexing jobs.

Problems and Workarounds

JPA is designed to be simple and easy to use, so it is less complex than Hibernate. Sometimes this means that mappings that were possible in Hibernate are not possible to do in JPA without some modifications to the object model.

Locale and Currency

JPA does not support the Locale and Currency types so some special OpenJPA annotations are required when using these datatypes.

The following example shows annotated getters for the Locale and Currency fields:

@Persistent(optional = false)
  @Externalizer("toString")
  @Factory("org.apache.commons.lang.LocaleUtils.toLocale")
  @Column(name = "LOCALE", length = 20)
  public Locale getLocale() {
    return locale;
  }

  @Persistent
  @Column(name = "CURRENCY", length = 3)
  @Externalizer("getCurrencyCode")
  @Factory("com.elasticpath.commons.util.impl.UtilityImpl.currencyFromString")
  public Currency getCurrency() {
    return currency;
  }

JPA uses the following settings to convert datatypes:

• @Externalizer: Specifies the externalizer method to use to convert the field values into the data type required by the database. This method only uses the object that is being serialized.
• @Factory: Specifies the fully qualified class and method to use to convert the data type of the values retrieved from the database. For this method, another class and a method to deserialize the data must be specified.

For more information, see the Reference Guide section in Apache OpenJPA User’s Guide.

Extensible Enums

Like Locale and Currency, extensible enums use the Externalizer and Factory annotations for conversion:

/**
* Get the status of the order.
*
* @return the order status
*/
@Override
@Persistent(optional = false)
@Column(name = "STATUS")
@Externalizer("getName")
@Factory("valueOf")
public OrderStatus getStatus() {
   return status;
}

Constructors

JPA requires all entities to have a default constructor which it will call when the persistence layer starts up. If there is no default constructor the build-time enhancer will add one.

Be careful if your constructor expects other objects to be previously instantiated. For example:

public ShoppingCartImpl() {
  super();
  this.shippingServiceLevelList = new ArrayList();
  this.viewHistory = (ViewHistory) getElasticPath().getBean("viewHistory");
}

The above is an old snippet from ShoppingCartImpl which has been re-implemented as a JPA Entity. Before this class was annotated as a JPA Entity, the constructor wasn’t being called until the ElasticPathImpl bean factory added a bean for ShoppingCartImpl, so the call to getElasticPath() would always work. However, once this class was added to the list of persistence entities, the constructor was being called before ElasticPathImpl was being instantiated, so the call to getElasticPath() would fail.

The work around is to put any code in the constructor that relies on other objects in a more appropriate place. In this particular case the code to get the viewHistory bean was moved into the getViewHistory method of ShoppingCartImpl.

Useful tools

The OpenJPA Maven plugin includes some useful tools that can help with using JPA.

Mapping Tool

The mapping tool can generate a schema from your object model. It is very useful for checking if your annotations map the object(s) to the current schema, or for generating the SQL if you add a new object.

You can run the tool by calling the following Maven command in the ep-core directory:

mvn -Dopenjpa.ConnectionDriverName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver openjpa:sql

The generated file, database.sql, can be found in ep-core/target.

Logging

Detailed logging for JPA can be enabled by adding the following to your log4j.properties files:

log4j.category.openjpa.jdbc.SQL=TRACE
log4j.category.openjpa.Runtime=TRACE
log4j.category.openjpa.MetaData=TRACE
log4j.category.openjpa.Enhance=TRACE
log4j.category.openjpa.Query=TRACE

These values should be removed or set to ${ep_log_level} for distribution.

Required libraries

The following libraries, which can be found in your local repository (by default, ~/.m2/repository), are required for use by JPA:

Group Id	Artifact Id	Version	Purpose
org.apache.openjpa	openjpa	2.4.0-ep2.0	Main Apache OpenJPA API
org.apache.geronimo.specs	geronimo-jta_1.1_spec	1.1	JTA specifications API
org.apache.geronimo.specs	geronimo-jms_1.1_spec	1.0.1	JMS (Java Messaging Service) specifications API
org.apache.geronimo.specs	geronimo-jpa_2.0_spec	1.1	JPA specifications API
net.sourceforge.serp	serp	1.14.1	Framework for manipulating Java bytecode
commons-collections	commons-collections	3.2.2	Newer release of the commons collections API
commons-pool	commons-pool	1.6	Object pooling components

Extensibility

Elastic Path includes classes to assist with extending JPA Persistence configuration:

• MergingPersistenceUnitPostProcessor

  Allows multiple jpa-persistence.xml files defining the same persistence unit name to exist in your project’s classpath. The list of mapping files and managed classes are merged at runtime. For details on adding references to an extension project’s jpa-persistence.xml, see Add references to the Persistence Unit

• OverridingPersistenceUnitPostProcessor

  Allows an extension project to list mapping files and managed classes that should be excluded from the persistence unit, as well as adding and/or overriding JPA properties. For more details on these overrides, see Exclude references from the Persistence Unit and Override Persistence Unit Properties