Eclipselink is living in the past, DDL not reflecting Entities

Question

Weird stuff... I have happily used EclipseLink / JPA 2 as provider for my persistence unit for a while (with a MySQL RDBMS in the back). I had DDL-drop/create turned off, since I wanted to keep records in the DB and there weren't any changes to the Entities anyway.

Now I've just made some bigger changes to one Entity (adding some attributes, renaming / re-typing others, importing a previously embedded object flat into this entity, etc). I turn on DDL-drop/create, re-deploy a couple of times, and ... nothing changes!

EclipseLink actually creates (and re-creates) the SQL Tables based on the old information! It's like it has a copy of the Java class somewhere and ignores the one I just updated...

Even more crazy, the previously embedded object is gone. I deleted the class-file. Eclipselink still creates the attributes in the table of the previously embedding class.

I see no Exceptions in GlassFish server.log. I dropped and recreated the persistence Unit, no change. Any ideas? (Let me know if I should post any code / log entries, and I'll update this post.)

Update: After setting eclipselink.logging.level to FINEST, I still see no exceptions. The DDL-script is created (with wrong columns in it) and happily executed on the DB (creating the wrong columns of course). In the logs I see EclipseLink talking about the fields that aren't there anymore:

[#|2010-09-22T17:04:11.392+0200|CONFIG|glassfish3.0.1|org.eclipse.persistence.session.file:/Users/hank/NetBeansProjects/CoreServer/build/classes/_coreServerPersistenceUnit.ejb_or_metadata|_ThreadID=20;_ThreadName=Thread-1;|
The alias name for the entity class [class mvs.entity.Shopper] is being defaulted to: Shopper.|#]

[#|2010-09-22T17:04:11.392+0200|CONFIG|glassfish3.0.1|org.eclipse.persistence.session.file:/Users/hank/NetBeansProjects/CoreServer/build/classes/_coreServerPersistenceUnit.ejb_or_metadata|_ThreadID=20;_ThreadName=Thread-1;|
The column name for element [field msisdn] is being defaulted to: MSISDN.|#]

[#|2010-09-22T17:04:11.392+0200|CONFIG|glassfish3.0.1|org.eclipse.persistence.session.file:/Users/hank/NetBeansProjects/CoreServer/build/classes/_coreServerPersistenceUnit.ejb_or_metadata|_ThreadID=20;_ThreadName=Thread-1;|
The column name for element [field imei] is being defaulted to: IMEI.|#]

In this case mvs.entity.Shopper is the class. msisdn is an existing field, but imei does not exist anymore. No idea where EclipseLink is getting the info from...

Btw, I have eclipselink.weaving set to false, since it was causing issues with lazy-loading. Could this be related?

Update 2: Following Gordon's advice I have looked for old copies of the entity, but couldn't find any. Deploying the appliation on a fresh GlassFish did not show the behaviour from above; instead the mapping was done correctly as was DDL-creation! Yippie :)

My only conclusion is that the old copy must be kept somewhere in GlassFish, even after undeploying... Does that make sense?

Answer 1

Either you have an orm.xml file on your classpath with the old mappings or the Old version of the class is being deployed. EclipseLink has no way to "store" classes between deployments. Try decompiling the class file in your deployment to see if it has your changes.

Answer 2

Installing a fresh copy of GlassFish and deploying the applications to it solved the problem. After comparing the two copies of GF, I found an old build artifact in glassfish/domains/domain1/lib, which contained old entity definitions. After removing that, everything was as expected.

So at the end of the day, my own stupid mistake.