JPA #OneToMany not persisting/cascading - jpa

Question

I have the following code in UserController in my Session Scoped Bean
public void addItemToBundle(ItemEntity item){
//System.out.println(item.getTitle());
try {
em.getTransaction().begin();
UserEntity user = em.find(UserEntity.class, this.username);
BundleEntity bundle = new BundleEntity();
BundleEntityPK compositePk = new BundleEntityPK();
compositePk.setCheckedOutDate(new Date());
compositePk.setItemId(item.getItemId());
compositePk.setUsername(user.getUsername());
bundle.setId(compositePk);
Set<BundleEntity> bundles = new HashSet<BundleEntity>();
bundles.add(bundle);
user.setBundleEntities(bundles);
em.persist(user);
em.flush();
em.getTransaction().commit();
} finally {
}
}
public String addToBundle(){
try {
addItemToBundle(item);
} catch (NullPointerException e) {
e.getMessage();
}
return null;
}
This code uses private ItemEntity item; which gets passed in by the following JSF markup:
<p:commandLink action="#{itemController.item}">
<f:setPropertyActionListener target="#{itemController.selectedItem}" value="#{movie}" />
</p:commandLink>
(I'm using PrimeFaces in this example) The problem is that the addItemToBundle is not calling any SQL code in the console (I have FINE enabled) and the bundle never gets created or added to the user. I also tried em.persist(user) and em.flush() and setting cascadeType in my UserEntity with no luck.
#OneToMany(mappedBy="userEntity",cascade=CascadeType.PERSIST)
private Set<BundleEntity> bundleEntities;
Thanks!

Answer 1

You know that this:
try {
addItemToBundle(item);
} catch (NullPointerException e) {
e.getMessage();
}
is very bad practice, right? Maybe, that's the problem here, you run into a NPE and never notice it.
You should at least log the exception to know what's going on there (just for demo purposes, I've used stdout, please replace with your favorite logging framework):
try {
addItemToBundle(item);
} catch (NullPointerException e) {
System.err.println(e.getMessage()); //use logger here
}