What is the proper way to re-attach detached objects in Hibernate?

So it seems that there is no way to reattach a stale detached entity in JPA.

merge() will push the stale state to the DB, and overwrite any intervening updates.

refresh() cannot be called on a detached entity.

lock() cannot be called on a detached entity, and even if it could, and it did reattach the entity, calling 'lock' with argument 'LockMode.NONE' implying that you are locking, but not locking, is the most counterintuitive piece of API design I've ever seen.

So you are stuck. There's an detach() method, but no attach() or reattach(). An obvious step in the object lifecycle is not available to you.

Judging by the number of similar questions about JPA, it seems that even if JPA does claim to have a coherent model, it most certainly does not match the mental model of most programmers, who have been cursed to waste many hours trying understand how to get JPA to do the simplest things, and end up with cache management code all over their applications.

It seems the only way to do it is discard your stale detached entity and do a find query with the same id, that will hit the L2 or the DB.

Mik

All of these answers miss an important distinction. update() is used to (re)attach your object graph to a Session. The objects you pass it are the ones that are made managed.

merge() is actually not a (re)attachment API. Notice merge() has a return value? That's because it returns you the managed graph, which may not be the graph you passed it. merge() is a JPA API and its behavior is governed by the JPA spec. If the object you pass in to merge() is already managed (already associated with the Session) then that's the graph Hibernate works with; the object passed in is the same object returned from merge(). If, however, the object you pass into merge() is detached, Hibernate creates a new object graph that is managed and it copies the state from your detached graph onto the new managed graph. Again, this is all dictated and governed by the JPA spec.

In terms of a generic strategy for "make sure this entity is managed, or make it managed", it kind of depends on if you want to account for not-yet-inserted data as well. Assuming you do, use something like

if ( session.contains( myEntity ) ) {
    // nothing to do... myEntity is already associated with the session
}
else {
    session.saveOrUpdate( myEntity );
}

Notice I used saveOrUpdate() rather than update(). If you do not want not-yet-inserted data handled here, use update() instead...