Broken Hibernate Save Method

Question

I have the following method in my Java application's DAO layer:

public void save(Employee emp) {
     System.out.println("emp type: " + emp.getClass().getName);
     getHibernateTemplate().save(emp);
     System.out.println("object saved!");
     System.out.flush();
}

The employee class does not extend from any other classes and has the following hbm file:

<hibernate-mapping>    
 <class name="org.myCompany.Employee" table="employee">
 <!-- fields omitted to save space -->
</hibernate-mapping>

Yet the insert fails with a java.lang.ClassCastException. At first, I thought something was wrong with my mapping (like an Integer mapping to a boolean) but then I turned on hibernate's show_sql debugging and found the following in my log file:

emp type: org.myCompany.Employee
Hibernate: insert into customer (.......) values (......)
java.lang.ClassCastException

Why did it pick an entirely random table to insert into? I'm sure that I must have some config file mis-configured, but I don't know which one. I checked the following:

• applicationContext-hibernate.xml -> both the Customer and Employee objects are mapped to their correct hbm files
• neither Customer or Employee have an inheritance relationship (there isn't even a common parent class like Person or User)

What else could I try?

Answer 1

In the calling class, I have the following two calls:

UserDAO.saveCustomer(customer);
UserDAO.saveEmployee(employee);

I thought that the customer object was saving correctly. I even put a debugging statement between the two calls and the debug method printed. However, commenting out the UserDAO.saveCustomer line fixed the problem. This made me examine the customer object more closely and I found that it was corrupt (wrong class). Hibernate must have been caching the insert statement until the Transaction was complete.

So this issue is now resolved.