This bug is actually a duplicate of

The title of this should be changed to "exclude-unlisted-classes is not parsed correctly with explicit value," but I can't change it.

I made some mistakes in my original posting but I cannot edit the description, either, so I will revise it here (due to discussion about element defaults here and the identical Spring Framework bug SPR-10767). Please ignore the description and focus instead of this:

In JPA 1.0 AND 2.0, <exclude-unlisted-classes> has the following usage:

1. Omitted means don't exclude / do scan.
2. <exclude-unlisted-classes /> means exclude / don't scan.
3. <exclude-unlisted-classes>false</exclude-unlisted-classes> means don't exclude / do scan.
4. <exclude-unlisted-classes>true</exclude-unlisted-classes> means exclude / don't scan.

A test case is attached. As attached, persistence.xml contains this:

...
        <!--<class>com.wrox.site.entities.Author</class>
        <class>com.wrox.site.entities.Book</class>
        <class>com.wrox.site.entities.Publisher</class>
        <exclude-unlisted-classes>false</exclude-unlisted-classes>-->
...

Notice that it all is commented out. If you compile and run this (in Tomcat), the entity classes are picked up (which is correct). Change persistence.xml to this (uncommenting just <exclude-unlisted-classes>):

...
        <!--<class>com.wrox.site.entities.Author</class>
        <class>com.wrox.site.entities.Book</class>
        <class>com.wrox.site.entities.Publisher</class>-->
        <exclude-unlisted-classes>false</exclude-unlisted-classes>
...

Now run it and the entity classes are NOT picked up, which is not correct. The behavior should be the reverse in this case. Now change the false to true:

...
        <!--<class>com.wrox.site.entities.Author</class>
        <class>com.wrox.site.entities.Book</class>
        <class>com.wrox.site.entities.Publisher</class>-->
        <exclude-unlisted-classes>true</exclude-unlisted-classes>
...

And the entities are still NOT picked up, which in this case is correct. So the explicit values are simply being ignored. A quick look at the current code confirms this:

                else if ( tag.equals( "exclude-unlisted-classes" ) ) {
                    persistenceUnit.setExcludeUnlistedClasses( true );
                }

My suggested code below resolves this issue:

    private void bindPersistenceUnit(ParsedPersistenceXmlDescriptor persistenceUnit, Element persistenceUnitElement) {
        ...
        persistenceUnit.setExcludeUnlistedClasses( false );
        NodeList children = persistenceUnitElement.getChildNodes();
        for ( int i = 0; i < children.getLength() ; i++ ) {
            ...
                else if ( tag.equals( "exclude-unlisted-classes" ) ) {
                    persistenceUnit.setExcludeUnlistedClasses( extractBooleanContent(element, true) );
                }
            ...
        }
    }
    ...
    private static boolean extractBooleanContent(Element element, boolean defaultBool) {
        String content = extractContent( element, null );
        if (content != null && content.length() > 0) {
            return Boolean.valueOf(content);
        }
        return defaultBool;
    }