Description Hans Harz 2010-09-03 08:47:29 EDT

Build Identifier: 2.1.1.v20100817-r8050

Symptoms:
- When creating an entity manager for the first time for the persistence unit multiple Descriptor Exceptions are thrown:
-- DatabaseSessionImpl throws an IndexOutOfBoundsException in initializeDescriptors() (caused by ObjectBuilder.getPrimaryKeyClassifications())
-- ClassDescriptor.getTable() throws a Descriptor Exception
- In each case the exception description is:
  The table [<Name of the table the @ManyToMany relation maps to>] is not present in this descriptor

Reason:
- org.eclipse.persistence.internal.libraries.asm.ClassReader of the embedded ASM library silently fails to load the eclipselink annotations from the persistent field in method accept(ClassVisitor, Attribute[], boolean) when the field is annotated with an annotation that has RetentionPolicy.CLASS

Workaround:
- Do not annotate persistent fields in Entity classes with annotations invisible at runtime (that is: have RetentionPolicy.CLASS)

We notice that the version of ASM embedded in EclipseLink seems to be much older than the official version of ASM at http://asm.ow2.org/

Note:
- We could never reproduce the behavior when running the code from within Eclipse. Only when running it from an ant script.
- We set severity to major, because this bug is very hard to track down.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
- Create a persistent class with a  @ManyToMany mapping. Define this mapping via annotations.
- Add an additional annotation with RetentionPolicy.CLASS to the field that holds the many-to-many mapping (for example the FindBugs @GuardedBy annotation).