Firing JPA listeners on collection field change

Question

I am using EntityListeners (@PreUpdate) to perform certain actions once my entities change. However I noticed that changes of a collection inside an entity does not fire the JPA entity listener, that makes sense because the table containing the entity was not changed, but a many to many table was.

Is there a way to make the entity listener fire in case of a collection change?

Answer 1

Listeners are fired for versioned entities (see javax.persistence.Version). Found via this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/17073342/12039

Answer 2

I would expect the events to be called. What JPA provider are you using?