[eclipse] The import javax.persistence cannot be resolved

I'm currently working on a project that requires EntityManager EntityManagerFacotry and Persistence each from the javax.persistence package. It seems to be for the database service, but the current code is not very well documented. By searching google it seems that there should be an xml file that comes along with this, but there isn't one of those either. I guess my question is simply how do I make these unresolved imports go away? Do I have to add another jar to the build path? It seems that I shouldn't have to since it's been around since 1.5.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

My solution was to select the maven profiles I had defined in my pom.xml in which I had declared the hibernate dependencies.

CTRL + ALT + P in eclipse.

In my project I was experiencing this problem and many others because in my pom I have different profiles for supporting Glassfish 3, Glassfish 4 and also WildFly so I have differet versions of Hibernate per container as well as different Java compilation targets and so on. Selecting the active maven profiles resolved my issue.

If anyone is using Maven, you'll need to add the dependency in the POM.XML file. The latest version as of this post is below:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.hibernate.javax.persistence</groupId>
    <artifactId>hibernate-jpa-2.1-api</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0.Final</version>
</dependency>

If you are using Hibernate as a JPA implementation and you are not using Maven/Gradle, the easier way is to download whole bundle instead of jar file one by one.

Go http://hibernate.org/orm/downloads/ and download the latest library, extract the jar from the required folder.

Yes, you will likely need to add another jar or dependency

javax.persistence.* is part of the Java Persistence API (JPA). It is only an API, you can think of it as similar to an interface. There are many implementations of JPA and this answer gives a very good elaboration of each, as well as which to use.

If your javax.persistence.* import cannot be resolved, you will need to provide the jar that implements JPA. You can do that either by manually downloading it (and adding it to your project) or by adding a declaration to a dependency management tool (for eg, Ivy/Maven/Gradle). See here for the EclipseLink implementation (the reference implementation) on Maven repo.

After doing that, your imports should be resolved.

Also see here for what is JPA about. The xml you are referring to could be persistence.xml, which is explained on page 3 of the link.

That being said, you might just be pointing to the wrong target runtime

If i recall correctly, you don't need to provide a JPA implementation if you are deploying it into a JavaEE app server like JBoss. See here "Note that you typically don't need it when you deploy your application in a Java EE 6 application server (like JBoss AS 6 for example).". Try changing your project's target runtime.

If your local project was setup to point to Tomcat while your remote repo assumes a JavaEE server, this could be the case. See here for the difference between Tomcat and JBoss.

Edit: I changed my project to point to GlassFish instead of Tomcat and javax.persistence.* resolved fine without any explicit JPA dependency.

In newer hibernate jars, you can find the required jpa file under "hibernate-search-5.8.0.Final\dist\lib\provided\hibernate-jpa-2.1-api-1.0.0.Final". You have to add this jar file into your project java build path. This will most probably solve the issue.

If you are using gradle with spring boot and spring JPA then add the below dependency in the build.gradle file

dependencies { compile group: 'org.springframework.boot', name: 'spring-boot-starter-data-jpa', version: '2.1.3.RELEASE'

}

I solved the problem by adding the following dependency

<dependency>
    <groupId>javax.persistence</groupId>
    <artifactId>persistence-api</artifactId>
    <version>2.2</version>
</dependency>

Together with

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jdbc</artifactId>
</dependency>

I ran into this same issue and realized that, since I am using spring boot, all I needed to do to resolve the issue was to add the following dependency:

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
    </dependency>