Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1, 6th Edition

Callbacks on Entity Classes

You can have an entity bean instance register for a callback on any of these lifecycle events by annotating a public, private, protected, or package-protected method on the bean class. This method must return void, throw no checked exceptions, and have no arguments:

import javax.persistence.Entity;
import javax.persistence.PostPersist;
import javax.persistence.PrePersist;

/**
 * Represents an Employee which is able to receive JPA
 * events.
 */
@Entity
public class EntityListenerEmployee
{

   private String name;

   public String getName() { return name; }
   public void setName(final String name) { this.name = name; }

   /*
    * Event Listeners; fired by JPA and track state in the EventTracker
    */

   @PrePersist
   @SuppressWarnings("unused")
   private void prePersist(){ ... }

   @PostPersist
   @SuppressWarnings("unused")
   private void postPersist(){ ... }

   ...
}

When an event is triggered on a particular managed entity instance, the entity manager will invoke the appropriate annotated method on the entity bean class.