Details
Major Description
Entities are flushed if the entity is serialized or if the detach and detachAll methods are invoked.
Similar to OPENJPA-119 I believe this is a remnant of the JDO persistence layer. Whether this is desirable in JPA or not, we need to be consistent whether the entity is detached via clear, or the detach methods.
To resolve the problem I propose adding a new Compatibility option : flushBeforeDetach. If this is set to true we'll keep the current JDO-like behavior. If false then we'll just detach. I believe the same setting could apply when entities are serialized although it might be clearer to have a separate option for serialization.
In the 1.0.x branch the flushBeforeDetach setting will only take effect for the detach, detachAll and serialization path. It will not affect the EntityManager.clear() method - in order to maintain backwards compatibility.
In 1.2.x + the clear method will also defer to the flushBeforeDetach setting.