Technotrance, Illusions and Perspectives

This cool tip describes a 3 step process to use JPA’s EntityManager initialized in JBoss Seam inside the Google Guice environment.

1). Define Seam’s components.xml with entity-manager-factory component as below

<components>
    <persistence:entity-manager-factory name="my_persistence_unit"/>
    <guice:init injector="#{myInjector}"/>
    <guice:injector name="myInjector">
        <guice:modules>
           <value>mypackage.MyEntityManagerModule</value>
        </guice:modules>
    </guice:injector>
</components>

where my_persistence_unit is the persistence unit name under META-INF/persistence.xml.

2). Define a Google Guice Module to wire-up Seam’s EnitiyManagerFactory by looking-up based on the expression-value and binding it to Guice context using a Provider

public class MyEntityManagerModule extends AbstractModule
{   public void configure()
    {   Expressions expressions = Expressions.instance();
        ValueExpression emfVE = expressions.createValueExpression("#{my_persistence_unit}");
        EntityManagerFactory emf = (EntityManagerFactory)emfVE.getValue();
        EntityManagerProvider.setEntityManagerFactory(emf);
        bind(EntityManager.class).toProvider(EntityManagerProvider.class).in(Scopes.SINGLETON);
     }
 }
 

class EntityManagerProvider implements Provider
    {   static EntityManagerFactory entityManagerFactory = null;
        public EntityManager get()
        {   return entityManagerFactory.createEntityManager();
        }
    }
 

3) One could use the EntityManager anywhere in the Seam-Guice hybrid component:

@Name("hybrid")
@Guice
public class HybridDAO
{  @Inject EntityManager entityManager;
   //other DAO methods.
}

This makes Guice components use EntityManager normally use Seam established EntityManagerFactory