Dear all

I have an object Contact which can have as many ContactNumbers as required. This is set up as a bag with a many-to-many relationship.

I can add as many ContactNumber objects to my Contact as I want and it works fine, and when I delete a Contact all child ContactNumber objects (and their references in the mapping table) are also deleted in the cascade.

If, however, I remove some of the ContactNumber objects from the Contact which I then pass it to the saveOrUpdate method it only deletes the references in the mapping table, not the actual contact numbers.

I have tried changing the cascade type from all to all-delete-orphan but without result - hope more than anything!

Any help/advice would be very welcome.

Nick.

This is absolutely intended for a many to many. An object in a many-to-many relation is not just deleted because it is removed from the collection, in fact it may be part of yet another collection. Probably you rather have a many-to-one if you want to do that, please think about it.

How does Hibernate know that an object in a many-to-many relationship can be deleted or is the application responsible for determining this?

Thanks,
-Ben

There is no way that Hibernate could implement such a thing efficiently. It is up to the application.