I'm trying to access a set in a one to many relationship so that I can delete some child records from it. Unfortunately, no matter what I try I always get an empty set.

I can call the method on the class to return the set of child items

eg Set temp = investigation.getInvestigationQualityOutcomes();

and temp is populated but if I examine the investigation object the InvestigationQualityOutcomes set is empty.

The mappings are:

<hibernate-mapping>
<class
name="com.aniteps.ctms.om.Investigation"
dynamic-update="false"
dynamic-insert="false"
select-before-update="false"
>
<id
name="investigationId"
column="investigationId"
type="java.lang.Integer"
>

<snip>

<set
name="investigationQualityOutcomes"
lazy="true"
inverse="true"
cascade="all"
sort="unsorted"
>

<key
column="investigationId"
>
</key>

<one-to-many
class="com.aniteps.ctms.om.InvestigationQualityOutcome"
/>
</set>

and for the child:

<hibernate-mapping>
<class
name="com.aniteps.ctms.om.InvestigationQualityOutcome"
dynamic-update="false"
dynamic-insert="false"
select-before-update="false"
>

<id
name="investQualityOutcomeId"
column="investQualityOutcomeId"
type="java.lang.Integer"
>

<snip>

<many-to-one
name="investigation"
class="com.aniteps.ctms.om.Investigation"
cascade="all"
outer-join="auto"
update="true"
insert="true"
access="property"
column="investigationId"
not-null="true"
/>

I'm new to Hibernate so don't know where to begin. Any ideas what could be going wrong?

try examining it again after Set temp = investigation.getInvestigationQualityOutcomes();

Still empty.

I was expecting the call to Set temp = investigation.getInvestigationQualityOutcomes(); to have populated the set for me but unless I'm going completely bonkers the set was still empty.