Hibernate version: 2.15 or so

Hello,

I have a 'best practises' question.
I have a 'root' entity/table called User. Almost all other entities/tables are associated with this User entity via FKs.
e.g.
User <-- FK -- UserProfiles
User <-- FK -- UserMessages
User <-- FK -- UserDemographics
User <-- FK -- UserPreferences
...

I guess this would be the Parent/Child relationship from HIA and online docs.

I am wondering about the best way to deal with cascades and entity saveOrUpdate calls.

More precisely, I am wondering whether it is considered best practise to have a DAO layer and saveOrUpdate calls for each of the Child entities, or whether it is better to just make proper bidirectional associations between Parent/Child entities, along with cascade="all-delete-orphan" and then just always call saveOrUpdate(Parent), and rely on Hibernate doing all transitive persistence, dirty checking, and doing all inserts, updates and deletes based on the cascade setting?

I am just worried about always going through this Parent entity. It would make code simpler - there would be no need to DAO layer save/update/delete for individual Child entities, but are there any dangers associated (no pun intended, really) with this?
In my case the Parent has a few Bags (List collections) associated with it, and some of those collections can have several thousand entities in them.

I guess my primary worry is how efficient and reliable it is to let Hibernate iterate through such collections on every XA commit in order to find dirty objects in associated collections, as opposed to me manually calling save/update/delete on those entities when the application calls for that.

Thanks,
Otis

Hello - just wondering if anyone has any advice about this.

If I have a DB where child tables point to the parent table via FK, are there any dangers in persisting (saving, updateing, and deleting) child entities by always going through the parent entity, as in:

ses.saveOrUpdate(parent);
or
ses.delete(parent);

Any dangers in that? (e.g. big object graph)

Thanks,
Otis

It mostly depends on you business case. If you BC requires it, cascading save huge amounts of code. Do some perf tests before rejecting this feature.

Thanks Emmanuel.

But from the Hibernate point of view, there are no issues with this?

I mean, calling ses.saveOrUpdate(parent) and having Hibernate traverse and dirty-check 2-3 collections with 1000-10000 child entities each, and possibly update/inserte/delete a handful in each collection, each time this ses.saveOrUpdate(parent) is called.

Is anyone here doing this?
Is anyone from the Hibernate Team doing things this way in their own applications or in their clients' applications?

Thanks,
Otis

There are no specific issue. But I must admit I usually does not cascade huge collections on dettached objects.