Is there a way to initialize the EntityManager without a persistence unit defined? You should define at least one persistence unit in the persistence.xml deployment descriptor. Can you give all the required properties to create an Entitymanager? The name attribute is required. The other attributes and elements are optional. (JPA specification). So this should be … Read more
It is not a good idea to allow an entity object to rely on the entity manager. It ties the entity to the persistence layer, which was a problem Doctrine 2 was specifically trying to solve. The biggest hassle in relying on the entity manager is that it makes your model hard to test in … Read more
Either way will add an entity to a PersistenceContext, the difference is in what you do with the entity afterwards. Persist takes an entity instance, adds it to the context and makes that instance managed (i.e. future updates to the entity will be tracked). Merge returns the managed instance that the state was merged with. … Read more