JPA EntityManager Example

Chandan SinghJanuary 14th, 2015Last Updated: February 27th, 2019

1 488 2 minutes read

In this example, we shall try to demonstrate how to use JPA EntityManager. As the name suggests, an EntityManager is a class that manages the state of the Entity(Persist/Update/Delete etc).

Every EntityManager object has an instance of EntityTransaction associated with it. EntityTransaction is used to manage the transactions.

We shall be using Hibernate as the JPA Vendor. The underlying database shall be MySQL.

The benefit of using the JPA over any specific ORM related libraries like Hibernate, iBatis is that we need not change the code when we change the vendor. The code is decoupled (or loosely coupled) with the underlying ORM framework.

Let’s build a sample application to see how we can avoid using Hibernate specific interfaces and use JPA interfaces instead:

Employee.java:

package com.jcg.pojo;

import javax.persistence.Column;
import javax.persistence.Entity;
import javax.persistence.GeneratedValue;
import javax.persistence.GenerationType;
import javax.persistence.Id;
import javax.persistence.Table;

@Entity
@Table(name="employee")
public class Employee
{
		protected Long employeeId;
		
		protected String name;

		@Id
		@Column(name="employee_id")
		@GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.IDENTITY)
		public  Long getEmployeeId()
		{
				return employeeId;
		}

		public  void setEmployeeId(Long employeeId)
		{
				this.employeeId = employeeId;
		}

		@Column(name="employee_name")
		public  String getName()
		{
				return name;
		}

		public  void setName(String name)
		{
				this.name = name;
		}

		@Override
    public String toString()
    {
		    return "Employee [employeeId=" + employeeId + ", name=" + name + "]";
    }
		
		
}

JPADemo.java:

package com.jcg;

import javax.persistence.EntityManager;
import javax.persistence.EntityManagerFactory;
import javax.persistence.Persistence;

import com.isg.maps.Employee;


/**
 * @author Chandan Singh
 *
 */
public class JPADemo
{
		public static void main(String[] args)
    {
				EntityManagerFactory emf = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("jcg-JPA");
				EntityManager em = emf.createEntityManager();
				
				em.getTransaction().begin();
				Employee employee = new Employee();
				employee.setName("Chandan");
				System.out.println("COMIITING");
				em.persist(employee);
				em.getTransaction().commit();
				
    }
}

persistence.java:

<?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_2_0.xsd"
        version="2.0">
        
        <persistence-unit name="jcg-JPA">
        	<provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>
		<properties>
			<property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect" />
			<property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="update" />
			<property name="hibernate.connection.driver_class" value="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver" />
			<property name="hibernate.connection.username" value="myusername" />
			<property name="hibernate.connection.password" value="mypwd" />
			<property name="hibernate.connection.url" value="jdbc:mysql://localhost/research_development" />
		</properties>
        </persistence-unit>
</persistence>

We define the connection properties in the persistence.xml.
Then we look up the persistence unit from the createEntityManagerFactory method of Persistence class of JPA. This returns an object of EntityManagerFactory.
Finally, we can get the EntityManager object from the EntityManagerFactory class.
We ,now, use the EntityManager object to perform CRUD operation on the Entities under the scope of an EntityTransaction object.
The last step is to commit the transaction back tot the database.