PersistenceManagers perform several actions that affect the lifecycle state of persistence-capable instances. Each of these actions is represented by multiple methods in the PersistenceManager interface: one method that acts on a single persistence-capable object, such as makePersistent, and corresponding methods that accept a collection or array of persistence-capable objects, such as makePersistentAll.

public Object makePersistent (Object pc);
public Collection makePersistentAll (Collection pcs);
public Object[] makePersistentAll (Object[] pcs);

Transitions transient instances to persistent-new, and creates managed copies of detached objects. This action can only be used in the context of an active transaction. On the next flush or commit, the newly persisted instances will be inserted into the datastore, and changes to the detached instances will be flushed to the corresponding datastore records. If you attempt to attach an instance whose representation has changed in the datastore since detachment, the makePersistent operation will throw an exception, or the transaction in which you perform the attachment will fail on commit, just as if a normal optimistic conflict were detected. If the attach process fails, the RollbackOnly flag is set on the current transaction.

For each argument, makePersistent[All] returns the argument instance if it was transient, or a managed copy of the argument instance if it was detached. Thus, when attaching objects, it is important to use the returned copies rather than continuing to act on the detached objects.

public void deletePersistent (Object pc);
public void deletePersistentAll (Collection pcs);
public void deletePersistentAll (Object[] pcs);

Transitions persistent instances to persistent-deleted, or persistent-new instances to persistent-new-deleted. This action, too, can only be called during an active transaction. The given instances will be deleted from the datastore on the next flush or commit.

public void makeTransient (Object pc);
public void makeTransientAll (Collection pcs);
public void makeTransientAll (Object[] pcs);

This action transitions persistent instances to transient. The instances immediately lose their association with the PersistenceManager and their JDO identity. The datastore records for the instances are not modified.

This action can only be run on clean objects. If it is run on a dirty object, a JDOUserException is thrown.

public void makeTransactional (Object pc);
public void makeTransactionalAll (Collection pcs);
public void makeTransactionalAll (Object[] pcs);

Use this action to make transient instances transient-transactional, or to bring persistent-nontransactional instances into the current transaction. In the latter case, the action must be invoked during an active transaction.

public void makeNontransactional (Object pc);
public void makeNontransactionalAll (Collection pcs);
public void makeNontransactionalAll (Object[] pcs);

Transitions transient-clean instances to transient, and persistent-clean instances to persistent-nontransactional. Invoking this action on a dirty instance will result in a JDOUserException.

public void refresh (Object pc);
public void refreshAll (Collection pcs);
public void refreshAll (Object[] pcs);
public void refreshAll ();
public void refreshAll (JDOException je);

Use the refresh action to make sure the persistent state of an instance is synchronized with the values in the datastore. refresh is intended for long-running optimistic transactions in which there is a danger of seeing stale data.

Calling the refreshAll method with no parameters acts on all transactional objects in the PersistenceManager cache. If there is no transaction in progress, the method is a no-op.

Calling the refreshAll method with a JDOException refreshes the failed object held by the exception, and recurses on all nested exceptions.

public void retrieve (Object pc);
public void retrieveAll (Collection pcs);
public void retrieveAll (Object[] pcs);
public void retrieveAll (Collection pcs, boolean fgOnly);
public void retrieveAll (Object[] pcs, boolean fgOnly);

Retrieving a persistent object immediately loads all of the object's persistent fields with their datastore values. You might use this action to make sure an instance's fields are fully loaded before transitioning it to transient. Note, however, that this action is not recursive. That is, if object A has a relation to object B, then passing A to retrieve will load B, but will not necessarily fill B's fields with their datastore values.

Setting fgOnly to true will ensure that the fields in the current fetch groups are loaded, but may not load other fields.