Can anybody tell me if there is a way to know in advance which objects will be deleted (or nullified or else) when deleting a certain object. (offcourse taking into account any cascade definitions)

thanks,

Bas

If you delete an object that has a 1-* relationship that is marked to cascade deletes, then all the child objects should be deleted.
I'm not sure if I understand exactly what you want - are you wanting some sort of pre-delete callback/notification on an individual object basis (for auditing purposed say)?

J

I just want to warn/inform my user what he is about to delete/do, when an object is deleted a lot happens (foreign keys are nullified, in the case of all-delete-orphan some objects will be cascade deleted) I just want some insight on what hibernate is about to do.

Well, Hibernate does what it has been told by you, in the mapping metadata. So it would be easy to add warning messages to your application after you specified the cascading deletes.

>So it would be easy to add warning messages to your application after you specified the cascading deletes

I don't think it will be easy to inform my user what objects are deleted and rows nullified since I have to mimic Hibernate's cascade behaviour (I think I can get the cascade metadata via the meta api) "by hand". I have to walk though the complete object-graph using the cascade meta data, it would be a lot easier if Hibernate is able to dry-run and generate the SQL/info and not execute it but return it (in an structured way)

But you have to specify the cascading yourself in the first place when you write the mappings? And this information has to exist outside of Hibernate, too?

I'd say that your domain model is the right place to decide what gets deleted when (cascading entity associations or "composition"). The mapping declaration for Hibernate is just an implementation of that model, as is the user interface/interaction in your application.