Unmanaged object

[Pierre Martin]

Hi,
I'm using EJB 3.0 entity bean.

I want to save a new Employee entity bean and associate it to the department id = 44;

To way it works, I need to
1-fetch the department entity bean
2-Set the department into the employee
3-Save the employee.

If you notices, the first step is useless since I already know the Id of the department. Why should I fetch it and get a manageg entity bean?

I would expect to be able to do that kind of save:

Department dep = new Department();
dep.setId(44);

Employee emp = new Employee();
emp.setDepartement(dep);

entityManager.persist(emp);

But that doesnt work because the framework forces to have a managed object as the department. I would have though that when I set CascadeType to nothing it would do the trick but it doesnt.

Is there any workaround for this ?

Tanx!

[Kumar Subramanian]

Use the getReference() method on entity manager. It will return the reference to your Department entity (just a lazy loadable proxy) for the pk passed as parameter. Use that reference to set in your employee object. This will not do a db select in case of hibernate JPA impl and I think it should be the same in other implementations.

Department dep = entityManager.getReference(Department.class, 44);

Employee emp = new Employee();
emp.setDepartement(dep);

entityManager.persist(emp);