I am trying to determine how cascading works. If I set cascade="all" on a particular Parent/Child one-to-one (modelled as many-one foreign key type ) relationship, then if I pass the Parent to session.save(), then does that pass the child also to session.save()?

If that is the case, is it true even if the child has already been saved in a previous session separately (and hence has a valid id value)? Does session.save(parent) still result in a session.save( child ) ?

So basically the question is does session.save( object ) always result in a CREATE query for that object and also all children in its entire object graph? This question assumes, cascade="all" is set on the parent/child relationship.

Thanks
Rama

No matter whether you are saving or updating an entity, all the cascades resulting from that operation will issue *either* an insert or an update depending on a few checks such as a version property, the unsaved-value specified for the id, and finally the result of the Interceptor.isUnsaved() method (if one).