JPA exception: Object: ... is not a known entity type

Question

I'm new to JPA and I'm having problems with the autogeneration of primary key values.

I have the following entity:

package jpatest.entities;

import java.io.Serializable;
import javax.persistence.Entity;
import javax.persistence.GeneratedValue;
import javax.persistence.GenerationType;
import javax.persistence.Id;

@Entity
public class MyEntity implements Serializable {
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
    private Long id;

    public Long getId() {
        return id;
    }

    public void setId(Long id) {
        this.id = id;
    }

    private String someProperty;

    public String getSomeProperty() {
        return someProperty;
    }

    public void setSomeProperty(String someProperty) {
        this.someProperty = someProperty;
    }

    public MyEntity() {
    }

    public MyEntity(String someProperty) {
        this.someProperty = someProperty;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return "jpatest.entities.MyEntity[id=" + id + "]";
    }    
}

and the following main method in other class:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    EntityManagerFactory emf = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("JPATestPU");
    EntityManager em = emf.createEntityManager();

    em.getTransaction().begin();

    MyEntity e = new MyEntity("some value");    
    em.persist(e); /* (exception thrown here) */

    em.getTransaction().commit();

    em.close();
    emf.close();
}

This is my persistence unit:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<persistence version="1.0" 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">
  <persistence-unit name="JPATestPU" transaction-type="RESOURCE_LOCAL">
    <provider>oracle.toplink.essentials.PersistenceProvider</provider>
    <class>jpatest.entities.MyEntity</class>
    <properties>
      <property name="toplink.jdbc.user" value="..."/>
      <property name="toplink.jdbc.password" value="..."/>
      <property name="toplink.jdbc.url" value="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/jpatest"/>
      <property name="toplink.jdbc.driver" value="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"/>
      <property name="toplink.ddl-generation" value="create-tables"/>
    </properties>
  </persistence-unit>
</persistence>

When I execute the program I get the following exception in the line marked with the proper comment:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Object: jpatest.entities.MyEntity[id=null] is not a known entity type.
        at oracle.toplink.essentials.internal.sessions.UnitOfWorkImpl.registerNewObjectForPersist(UnitOfWorkImpl.java:3212)
        at oracle.toplink.essentials.internal.ejb.cmp3.base.EntityManagerImpl.persist(EntityManagerImpl.java:205)
        at jpatest.Main.main(Main.java:...)

What am I missing?

Answer 1

I ran into this same problem using NetBeans IDE 6.9.

Apparently, this is a known issue. See http://wiki.eclipse.org/EclipseLink/Development/JPA_2.0/metamodel_api#DI_101:_20100218:_Descriptor.javaClass_is_null_on_a_container_EM_for_a_specific_case. Also see http://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=181068.

I added the last line below to persistence.xml and it fixed it for me.

<provider>org.eclipse.persistence.jpa.PersistenceProvider</provider>
<!-- Add the following to work around exception issue -->
<exclude-unlisted-classes>false</exclude-unlisted-classes>

Answer 2

As Charles pointed out in his answer, the problem is not the id generation, but the persistence layer not finding the entity.

As you, I am also new to JPA. I have tried to write a "Hello World" JPA application using org.eclipse.persistence.jpa.PersistenceProvider when I got this error. The mentioned workaround also worked for me. Moreover, through trial-error I also found that to declare your entities, you must always anotate @entity in each entity and:

• if you set exclude-unlisted-classes to true, you also have to list the entities within class elements in your persistence.xml
• if you set exclude-unlisted-classes to false the persistence layer can find the entities regardles of the class element in your persistence.xml.