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

Also ran into this error message, but the root cause was of a different flavor from those referenced in the other answers here.

Generic answer: Make sure that once hibernate loads an entity, no code changes the primary key value in that object in any way. When hibernate flushes all changes back to the database, it throws this exception because the primary key changed. If you don't do it explicitly, look for places where this may happen unintentionally, perhaps on related entities that only have LAZY loading configured.

In my case, I am using a mapping framework (MapStruct) to update an entity. In the process, also other referenced entities were being updates as mapping frameworks tend to do that by default. I was later replacing the original entity with new one (in DB terms, changed the value of the foreign key to reference a different row in the related table), the primary key of the previously-referenced entity was already updated, and hibernate attempted to persist this update on flush.