Hibernate: How to fix “identifier of an instance altered from X to Y”?

Question

org.hibernate.HibernateException: identifier of an instance 
of org.cometd.hibernate.User altered from 12 to 3

in fact, my user table

Answer 1

I was facing this issue, too.

The target table is a relation table, wiring two IDs from different tables. I have a UNIQUE constraint on the value combination, replacing the PK. When updating one of the values of a tuple, this error occured.

This is how the table looks like (MySQL):

CREATE TABLE my_relation_table (
  mrt_left_id BIGINT NOT NULL,
  mrt_right_id BIGINT NOT NULL,
  UNIQUE KEY uix_my_relation_table (mrt_left_id, mrt_right_id),
  FOREIGN KEY (mrt_left_id)
    REFERENCES left_table(lef_id),
  FOREIGN KEY (mrt_right_id)
    REFERENCES right_table(rig_id)
);

The Entity class for the RelationWithUnique entity looks basically like this:

@Entity
@IdClass(RelationWithUnique.class)
@Table(name = "my_relation_table")
public class RelationWithUnique implements Serializable {

  ...

  @Id
  @ManyToOne
  @JoinColumn(name = "mrt_left_id", referencedColumnName = "left_table.lef_id")
  private LeftTableEntity leftId;

  @Id
  @ManyToOne
  @JoinColumn(name = "mrt_right_id", referencedColumnName = "right_table.rig_id")
  private RightTableEntity rightId;

  ...

I fixed it by

// usually, we need to detach the object as we are updating the PK
// (rightId being part of the UNIQUE constraint) => PK
// but this would produce a duplicate entry, 
// therefore, we simply delete the old tuple and add the new one
final RelationWithUnique newRelation = new RelationWithUnique();
newRelation.setLeftId(oldRelation.getLeftId());
newRelation.setRightId(rightId);  // here, the value is updated actually
entityManager.remove(oldRelation);
entityManager.persist(newRelation);

Thanks a lot for the hint of the PK, I just missed it.