When I tried migrating my JBoss 4.2 [war] application which uses Spring to manage transactions, to JBoss 5.1, I got the following error message.

11:18:55,683 ERROR [AbstractKernelController] Error installing to Start: name=persistence.unit:unitName=#demo state=Create
java.lang.RuntimeException: Specification violation [EJB3 JPA 6.2.1.2] - You have not defined a jta-data-source for a JTA enabled persistence context named: demo
	at org.jboss.jpa.deployment.PersistenceUnitInfoImpl.<init>(PersistenceUnitInfoImpl.java:115)
	at org.jboss.jpa.deployment.PersistenceUnitDeployment.start(PersistenceUnitDeployment.java:275)

Here’s the persistence.xml file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<persistence xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_1_0.xsd"
 version="1.0">
 <persistence-unit name="demo">
 <provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>
 <class>demo.jpa.User</class>
 <class>demo.jpa.Issue</class>
 <class>demo.jpa.UploadedFile</class>
 <properties>
   <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create" />
   <property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect" />
   <property name="hibernate.show_sql" value="true" />
   <property name="hibernate.format_sql" value="true" />
   <property name="hibernate.use_sql_comments" value="true" />
 </properties>
 </persistence-unit>
</persistence>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<persistence xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_1_0.xsd"
 version="1.0">
 <persistence-unit name="demo">
 <provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>
 <class>demo.jpa.User</class>
 <class>demo.jpa.Issue</class>
 <class>demo.jpa.UploadedFile</class>
 <properties>
   <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create" />
   <property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect" />
   <property name="hibernate.show_sql" value="true" />
   <property name="hibernate.format_sql" value="true" />
   <property name="hibernate.use_sql_comments" value="true" />
 </properties>
 </persistence-unit>
</persistence>

Solution/workaround

JBoss loads file named “persistence.xml” through this file:

jboss-5.1.0.GA/server/default/deployers/ejb3.deployer/META-INF/jpa-deployers-jboss-beans.xml

… via this code snippet (line 21-95)

   <bean name="PersistenceParsingDeployer" class="org.jboss.jpa.deployers.PersistenceParsingDeployer"/>
   <bean name="PersistenceDeployer" class="org.jboss.jpa.deployers.PersistenceDeployer"/>

   <bean name="PersistenceUnitDeployer" class="org.jboss.jpa.deployers.PersistenceUnitDeployer">
    ...
   </bean>

Solution 1:

Comment out the above lines. This solution is a server configuration modification and therefore must be done on every server (dev/qa/production) that you want to run your app on. You may not be able to use this approach if you don’t have control over your [production] server configuration. See Solution 2 for an application oriented solution.

Solution 2:

1. Rename the persistence.xml file to something else, for example, spring-persistence.xml
2. Change the config for the spring entityManagerFactory bean to explicitly refer to this new file. See below

Spring configuration – before:

<bean id="entityManagerFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean">
 <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
 <property name="jpaVendorAdapter">
   <bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.HibernateJpaVendorAdapter" />
 </property>
</bean>

<bean id="entityManagerFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean">
 <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
 <property name="jpaVendorAdapter">
   <bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.HibernateJpaVendorAdapter" />
 </property>
</bean>

Spring configuration – after:

<bean id="entityManagerFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean">
 <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
 <property name="jpaVendorAdapter">
   <bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.HibernateJpaVendorAdapter" />
 </property>
 <!-- ADD THE FOLLOWING PROPERTY -->
 <!-- provide the location of new persistence.xml -->
 <property name="persistenceXmlLocation" value="classpath:META-INF/spring-persistence.xml" />
</bean>

<bean id="entityManagerFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean">
 <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
 <property name="jpaVendorAdapter">
   <bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.HibernateJpaVendorAdapter" />
 </property>
 <!-- ADD THE FOLLOWING PROPERTY -->
 <!-- provide the location of new persistence.xml -->
 <property name="persistenceXmlLocation" value="classpath:META-INF/spring-persistence.xml" />
</bean>

Reference

See more details of the corresponding JIRA issue at jboss.org

From http://www.vineetmanohar.com/2010/04/06/ejb3-jpa-error-when-migrating-from-jboss-version-4-to-5/