Objectify and conflicting OnSave / OnLoad callbacks

Since the beginning, I've been using Google App Engine. I tried first its Python implementation, then I moved to its Java implementation. The move to Java was dictated by the simplicity of the language and the largest set of tooling to code, test, and debug the applications.

My first implementation was using JDO as the ORM layer with my own servlet infrastructure implementing a REST interface. Nowadays, I use Objectify in place of JDO and RestEasy (with Guice and JAX-RS).

In my latest project, I've implemented two sets of entities:

• One set which tracks with a creation date and a version number;
• One set which extends the first one and tracks the identifier of their owners.

Both base classes implement an @OnSave callback to control their core information. Here are a short version of the these classes.

@Index public abstract class AbstractBase<T> {
    @Id private Long id;
    @Unindex protected Date creation;
    @Unindex protected Long version;

    // Accessors
    // ...

    @OnSave protected void prePersist() {
        if (creation == null) {
            creation = new DateTime().toDate();
            version = Long.valueOf(0L);
        }
        version ++;
    }
}

@Index public abstract class AbstractAuthBase<T> extends AbstractBase<T> {
    @Index private Long ownerId;

    // Accessors
    // ...

    @OnSave protected void prePersist() {
        if (ownerId == null || Long.valueOf(0L).equals(ownerId)) {
            throw new ClientErrorException("Field ownerId is missing");
        }
    }
}

When I ran the implementation of the code above, I faced a weird behavior:

• The entities of the User class extending only AbstractBase had their creation and version fields correctly set when persisted.
• The entities of the Category class extending AbstractAuthBase had none of these two fields set!

It appears the issue comes from Objectify which was only invoking the first method! And twice BTW...

I looked then at the Objectify implementation, precisely at the methods ConcreteEntityMetadata<T>.processLifeCycleCallbacks() and ConcreteEntityMetadata<T>.invokeLifeCycleCallbacks(). In the first method, you can see that the reference of the methods annotated @OnSave and @OnLoad are accumulated in two lists. In the second method, the given list is parsed and the method is applied to the current object.

My issue arose because applying twice the method prePersist() on a instance of a Category class was always calling the method of the base class AbstractAuthBase<T>! I fixed the issue by renaming the callbacks (one in checkOwnerId() and the other in setCreationAndVersion()).

A+, Dom