For some reason, I was hoping that when I do a session.merge(Object), hibernate would find all the existing records that have changed and update them appropriately-- even for all relationships. However for the relationships, it seems to create new records entirely rather than updating existing records. Hence if I had a base class with a one-to-many association with a subBase class, this maps to a Base_Table and SubBase_Table respectively. When I insert a record w/ hydration of the base object, I would get something like this--



When I change the text in the SubBase object to "Second insertion" (base.getSubBase().setText("Second insertion"); and then do a session.merge(base);, I get this behavior--



Is this the default behavior of merge()? I was hoping that it would just update the subbase record instead of inserting another, i.e. I would like this to happen on session.merge(base);--



How do I get the update-insteadof-insert behavior (if possible)?

-Larry

what does your cascade mapping say ?

you might want to review

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/reference/en/html/objectstate.html#objectstate-transitive

For all of my one-to-manys, I annotated them with CascadeType=ALL. I read the document you mentioned and it seems like I'm missing a delete-orphan value, but the CascadeType enumeration does not give me this option (unless it is inherently built into ALL). Is this what's causing an insertion rather than an update?

-Larry

Nevermind. After doing research, I found out that EJB3 does not support DELETE_ORPHAN so I just use hibernate's @Cascade annotation instead. Thanks for your help.

-Larry

Although I've been able to fix @OneToMany, I'm running into a similar issue with @OneToOne where any update via merge() does not delete the orphan record. I use the EJB3 CascadeType=ALL for my one-to-one annotation. Since there is no such thing as a delete_orphan for one-to-ones, how do I get rid of the orphan records in the child of a one-to-one association?

-Larry