How to inject the JPA EntityManager in a Tomcat-based web application?

Dear hibernate community,
I am running into problems because tomcat is not a complaint java EE server, hence I need to manage entitymanager myself (application managed entitymanager). However hibernate throws an exception “org.hibernate.HibernateException: Flush during cascade is dangerous” when multiple threads works under the same tables… my question is is this the right way to manage entitymanager in a thread-safety.

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

public class EntityManagerHelper {

    private static final EntityManagerFactory emf;
    private static final ThreadLocal<EntityManager> threadLocal;

    static {
        emf = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("Persistent_Name");
        threadLocal = new ThreadLocal<EntityManager>();
    }

    public static EntityManager getEntityManager() {
        EntityManager em = threadLocal.get();

        if (em == null) {
            em = emf.createEntityManager();
            // set your flush mode here
            threadLocal.set(em);
        }
        return em;
    }

    public static void closeEntityManager() {
        EntityManager em = threadLocal.get();
        if (em != null) {
            em.close();
            threadLocal.set(null);
        }
    }

    public static void closeEntityManagerFactory() {
        emf.close();
    }

    public static void beginTransaction() {
        getEntityManager().getTransaction().begin();
    }

    public static void rollback() {
        getEntityManager().getTransaction().rollback();
    }

    public static void commit() {
        getEntityManager().getTransaction().commit();
    }
}

thank you very much

It’s much better if you’re using a framework for that, so you have 2 choices:

  1. You can use TomEE which implements the Java EE CDI spec
  2. You can use Spring to inject the EntityManager and use declarative transaction boundaries