Java Data Objects

Modifying Persistent Instances Outside a Transaction

JDO manages updates to the datastore by tracking changes made to persistent instances during a transaction. To avoid losing updates, you should have an active transaction when changing fields of persistent instances. When the transaction commits, the changes are made in the datastore.

However, you can write applications that manage a cache of nontransactional persistent instances, where the datastore is updated outside your application. With these applications, the cache becomes stale relative to the current state in the datastore. But if your application is made aware of these changes—for example, by receiving a stream of change notifications—your application can update the cache to reflect the current state of the datastore instances. The stream might consist only of the keys of the instances, in which case the application can simply invalidate the cached instances by calling evict( ) or refresh( ).

But if the stream contains not only the keys but also the changed values for persistent fields, your application can use the stream values to update the cached instances to reflect the current contents of the datastore.

With the NontransactionalWrite property set to false, the only way to update nontransactional instances is to invalidate them in the cache and then fetch the instances from the datastore when they are next needed. But with NontransactionalWrite set to true, your application can update the persistent instances in the ...