How to fix the Hibernate “object references an unsaved transient instance - save the transient instance before flushing” error

Question

I receive following error when I save the object using Hibernate

object references an unsaved transient instance - save the transient instance before flushi         


        

Answer 1

Introduction

As I explained in this article when using JPA and Hibernate, an entity can be in one of the following 4 states:

• New - A newly created object that hasn’t ever been associated with a Hibernate Session (a.k.a Persistence Context) and is not mapped to any database table row is considered to be in the New or Transient state.

  To become persisted we need to either explicitly call the persist method or make use of the transitive persistence mechanism.

• Persistent - A persistent entity has been associated with a database table row and it’s being managed by the currently running Persistence Context.

  Any change made to such an entity is going to be detected and propagated to the database (during the Session flush-time).

• Detached - Once the currently running Persistence Context is closed all the previously managed entities become detached. Successive changes will no longer be tracked and no automatic database synchronization is going to happen.

• Removed - Although JPA demands that managed entities only are allowed to be removed, Hibernate can also delete detached entities (but only through a remove method call).

Entity state transitions

To move an entity from one state to the other, you can use the persist, remove or merge methods.

Fixing the problem

The issue you are describing in your question:

object references an unsaved transient instance - save the transient instance before flushing

is caused by associating an entity in the state of New to an entity that's in the state of Managed.

This can happen when you are associating a child entity to a one-to-many collection in the parent entity, and the collection does not cascade the entity state transitions.

So, as I explained in this article, you can fix this by adding cascade to the entity association that triggered this failure, as follows:

The @OneToOne association

@OneToOne(
    mappedBy = "post",
    orphanRemoval = true,
    cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
private PostDetails details;

Notice the CascadeType.ALL value we added for the cascade attribute.

The @OneToMany association

@OneToMany(
    mappedBy = "post", 
    orphanRemoval = true,
    cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
private List comments = new ArrayList<>();

Again, the CascadeType.ALL is suitable for the bidirectional @OneToMany associations.

Now, in order for the cascade to work properly in a bidirectional, you also need to make sure that the parent and child associations are in sync.

Check out this article for more details about what is the best way to achieve this goal.

The @ManyToMany association

@ManyToMany(
    mappedBy = "authors",
    cascade = {
        CascadeType.PERSIST, 
        CascadeType.MERGE
    }
)
private List books = new ArrayList<>();

In a @ManyToMany association, you cannot use CascadeType.ALL or orphanRemoval as this will propagate the delete entity state transition from one parent to another parent entity.

Therefore, for @ManyToMany associations, you usually cascade the CascadeType.PERSIST or CascadeType.MERGE operations. Alternatively, you can expand that to DETACH or REFRESH.

For more details about the best way to map a @ManyToMany association, check out this article as well.