5.4.4.6. Entity Listeners

Entity Listeners are designed to react to the entity instances lifecycle events on the middle tier. See an example in the cookbook.

A listener is a class implementing one or several interfaces from the com.haulmont.cuba.core.listener package. The listener will react to events corresponding to the implemented interfaces.

BeforeDetachEntityListener

onBeforeDetach() method is called before the object is detached from EntityManager on transaction commit.

This listener can be used for populating non-persistent entity attributes before sending it to the client tier.

BeforeAttachEntityListener

onBeforeAttach() method is called before the object is attached to the persistence context as a result of EntityManager.merge() operation.

This listener can be used, for example, to populate persistent entity attributes before saving it to the database.

BeforeInsertEntityListener

onBeforeInsert() method is called before a record is inserted into the database. All kinds of operations can be performed with the current EntityManager available within this method.

AfterInsertEntityListener

onAfterInsert() is called after a record is inserted into database, but before transaction commit. This method does not allow modifications of the current persistence context, however, database modifications can be done using QueryRunner.

BeforeUpdateEntityListener

onBeforeUpdate() method is called before a record is updated in the database. All kinds of operations can be performed with the current EntityManager available within this method.

AfterUpdateEntityListener

onAfterUpdate() method is called after a record was updated in the database, but before transaction commit. This method does not allow modifications of the current persistence context, however, database modifications can be done using QueryRunner.

BeforeDeleteEntityListener

onBeforeDelete() method is called before a record is deleted from the database (in the case of soft deletion – before updating a record). All kinds of operations can be performed with the current EntityManager available within this method.

AfterDeleteEntityListener

onAfterDelete() method is called after a record is deleted from the database (in the case of soft_deletion – before updating a record), but before transaction commit. This method does not allow modifications of the current persistence context, however, database modifications can be done using QueryRunner.

An entity listener should be a managed bean, so you can use injection. For example:

@Component("sample_MyEntityListener")
public class MyEntityListener implements
        BeforeInsertEntityListener<MyEntity>,
        BeforeUpdateEntityListener<MyEntity> {

    @Inject
    protected Metadata metadata;

    @Override
    public void onBeforeInsert(MyEntity entity, EntityManager entityManager) {
        Foo foo = metadata.create(Foo.class);
        ...
        entity.setFoo(foo);
        entityManager.persist(foo);
    }

    @Override
    public void onBeforeUpdate(MyEntity entity, EntityManager entityManager) {
        Foo foo = entityManager.find(Foo.class, entity.getFoo().getId());
        ...
    }
}

An entity listener can be specified for an entity in two ways:

  • Statically – the bean names of listeners are listed in @Listeners annotation on the entity class.

    @Entity(...)
@Table(...)
@Listeners("sample_MyEntityListener")
public class MyEntity extends StandardEntity {
    ...
}

  • Dynamically – the bean name of the listener is passed to the addListener() method of the EntityListenerManager bean. See an example in this section: Running Code on Startup.

Only one listener instance of a certain type is created for all instances of a particular entity class, therefore listener must not have a state.

If several listeners of the same type (for example from annotations of entity class and its parents and also added dynamically) were declared for an entity, they will be invoked in the following order:

  1. For each ancestor, starting from the most distant one, dynamically added listeners are invoked first, followed by statically assigned listeners.

  2. Once parent classes are processed, dynamically added listeners for the given class are invoked first, followed by statically assigned.

Tip

If you need to do some calculations and update attributes of multiple entity instances at once on transaction commit, consider using a transaction listener.