I have a bidirectional parent<->child relationship from DocumentClass (parent) to Document (child) where DocumentClass holds an indexed list of Documents. The db table for Document has an index column "doc_position", and the relevant excerpts from my mappings are

[DocumentClass.hbm.xml]
<list name="documents" lazy="true" inverse="true" cascade="all-delete-orphan">

<key column="documentclass_id"/>

<index column="doc_position"/>

<one-to-many class="manplan.j2ee.model.Document"/>
</list>

[Document.hbm.xml]
<many-to-one
name="documentClass"
class="manplan.j2ee.model.DocumentClass"
cascade="save-update"
outer-join="auto"
update="true"
insert="true"
column="documentclass_id"
not-null="false"
/>

Upon saving a newly created DocumentClass and its associated child Documents via Hibernate ignores the index column "doc_position" and leaves it at <null> whereas all other columns are treated correctly. I have some other associations with list semantics which exhibit the exact same behaviour. I am running Hibernate 2.1.2 against a Firebird database. What am I doing wrong here?

Thanks,
Olaf

Indexed colelction cannot be well managed in a bidir manner.
You should map the idnex column in your child and maintain it manually.
Hibernate set it to null because you set inverse="true" in the one side.

Emmanuel, thanks for the info. Meanwhile, I have found the relevant FAQ entry. Anyway, I switched to typed arrays instead of lists since my domain objects are exposed via webservices. But now ist seems as if Hibernate doesn't support cascade="all-delete-orphan" when using arrays? The docs didn't say anything to this effect, so I might be wrong.

Cheers,
Olaf

You must keep the underlying collection instance to benefit all-delete-orphan capability.
This is usually not possible in such cases as Webservices