How to debug "Found two representations of same collection"?

Question

I have found several questions about this, but none with a complete explaintation of the problem, and how to debug it - the answers are all anecdotal.

The problem is that in a Play 1.2.4 JPA test, I'm getting this exception when I save() a model:

org.hibernate.HibernateException: Found two representations of same collection: models.Position.projects

I would like to know:

1. Is there a documentation of this problem in general, unrelated to Play? The issue is in hibernate, yet a lot of the Google results on this are within Play apps.
2. What are some basic best practices to avoid this problem?
3. Is it caused by Play? Or something I'm doing wrong?
4. How to resolve in my specific case?

Here is a reproduction of the problem on github. I have four entities:

@Entity
public class Person extends Model {
    public String name;

    @OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
    public List<Position> positions;
}


@Entity
public class Position extends Model {
    public Position(){}
    public Position(Company companies) {
        this.companies = companies;
        this.projects = new ArrayList<Project>();
    }

    @OneToOne
    public Company companies;

    @ManyToOne
    public Person person;

    @OneToMany
    public List<Project> projects;
}

@Entity
public class Company extends Model {
    public String name;
}

@Entity
public class Project extends Model {
    public Project(){}
    public Project(String field, String status){
        this.theField = field;
        this.status = status;
    }

    @ManyToOne
    public Position position;

    public String theField;
    public String status;
}

And my persistence code:

Company facebook = new Company();
facebook.name = "Facebook";
facebook.save();
Company twitter = new Company();
twitter.name = "Twitter";
twitter.save();

Person joe = new Person();
joe.name = "Joe";
joe.save();

joe.positions = new ArrayList<Position>();

Position joeAtFacebook = new Position(facebook);
joeAtFacebook.projects.add(new Project("Stream", "Architect"));
joeAtFacebook.projects.add(new Project("Messages", "Lead QA"));
joe.positions.add(joeAtFacebook);

Position joeAtTwitter = new Position(twitter);
joeAtTwitter.projects.add(new Project("Steal stuff from Facebook", "CEO"));
joe.positions.add(joeAtTwitter);
joe.save();

BTW, I've tried adding the Play associations module as one person suggested, and it does't seem to help.

I see that indeed that tables that are created are duplicate in a sense:

I have both a person_position table and a position table, where both contain similar fields: person_position contains a Person_id and positions_id, while the position table contain id (meaning position id), person_id, and companies_id. So I understand some kind of unintended redundancy is created by my model definition, but I don't really understand how to solve it.

I thought this might be related to bi-directional mappings, but here is a branch where the model is uni-directional (I removed some back-references) - and the problem still occurs.

Answer 1

As far as I've been able to tell, the error is caused by any combination of:

• Lacking / missing mappedBy parameter on @OneToMany annotations. This parameter should receive the name of the field in the target model that refers back to this model.
• Old hibernate - Play 1.2.4 ships with hibernate 3.6.1 ... upgrading to 3.6.8 seems to resolve another such issue (just add the following to dependencies.yml, and play deps)

- org.hibernate -> hibernate-core 3.6.8.Final:

force: true

For me, the above steps solved the issue.

It is in fact a bug in hibernate, because it is thrown when persisting objects, while it actually implies a "design time" problem that should be detected when creating the schema.

Steps I used to debug:

• Wrote a test that reproduced the problem
• Added the associations module - I'm not sure if it resolved a part of the issue, or made it worse.
• Debugged through hibernate code, and realized this probably indicates a hibernate problem, not a user / configuration error.
• Noticed that hibernate has quite a few bugfix versions after 3.6.1, and decided to try my luck and upgrade.
• Also important, cleaning the tmp folder can't hurt - Play caches compiled jars there, and after a major change like upgrading hibernate version, it might be worthwhile to clean it.