Here's the situation: I have an entity that refers to other entities, like this: @Entity public class Invoice implements Serializable { | @ManyToOne private transient Customer customer; | } It must implement Serializable so I can send it to message queues. I labeled the customer field as transient, because I don't want it to serialize and send the entire Customer object every time (that object has a bunch of its own fields). So, because that's transient, this Invoice entity shows up, is de-seriaiized, and the customer field is null of course. I then do invoice = entityManager.merge(invoice); to re-attach this now-detached entity. But when I do that, the customer field gets set to null in the DB. It is taking the state from the un-serialized object and writing over what's in the DB. That's not what I want it to do, of course. What's the right way to do this kind of thing? An easy work around I have is to use entityManager.find(Invoice.class, invoice.getId()) but that seems wrong. Ideas? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4016805#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...