i have following situation

grandParent --> has set of parents
each Parent -- > has set of children

relation between grandParent and Parent is cascade = "all-delete-orphan" and inverse="true"

relation between Parent and its children is cascade = "all-delete-orphan" and inverse="true"

now when i set Parent.clear() -- > trying to remove all its children, hibernate deletes all records from children table,

but how do i tell hibernate to delete that particular Parent from grandParent table. it does not delete records from Parent table.

thanks

session.delete(parent) should work. Isnt it working?

actually all i am doing is session.saveOrUpdate(grandParent)

and because of relations it delets all children from parent but does not delete that empty parent from grandparent.

do i need to delete each empty(no children) parent manually ?

Clearing the parent list would simply remove the link.

Since your objective in this scenario is really to delete the parent objects, simply call
session.delete(parent)
This would delete the children also.

Here is what I am trying.

Grandparent gp = (Grandparent)session.load(Grandparent.class, pid);
Set <Parent> p = gp.getParent();
Set <Child> c = p.getChildren();

//This works, and removes specified children from database
p.getChildren().remove(0); //With iterator
p.getChildren().remove(1); //With iterator
session.update(gp);

//This does not remove any parent from the database
gp.getParent().remove(0); //With iterator
gp.getParent().remove(1); //With iterator
session.update(gp);



So my only confusion is, if removing children from parent causes hibernate to delete children, why not removing the parent from grandparent cause hibernate to delete parent?