Hi,
I am experiencing some problems with a Structure that looks like the following:

Article has Set<Topics> has Set<Item>
I am assigning the IDs myself, they're strings. However, I try to saveOrUpdate the final article and cascade the Topics and Items down. There is however one problem - some topics might include the same items - that's when I get the Following error:
a different object with the same identifier value was already associated with the session: [com.headcaselabs.nlp.wiki.entities.Item#Titanic]


I would appreciate any recommendations... sorry for posting previously related things - I think however that I have narrowed the problem down and this here is more specific!

Thanks!


[code]
class Article implements Serializable{
String name;
Set<Topic> topic;
@Id @Column(columnDefinition=" varbinary(255) NOT NULL")
String getName() {..}
void setName(..

@ManyToMany(cascade=CasacadeType.ALL)
Set<Topic> getTopic() {..}
setTopic...

}

class Topic implements Serializable{
String name;
Set<Item> items;
@Id @Column(columnDefinition=" varbinary(255) NOT NULL")
String getName() {..}
void setName(..

@ManyToMany(cascade=CasacadeType.ALL)
Set<Item> getItems() {..}
setItems...

}

class Item implements Serializable {
public String name;
@Id @Column(columnDefinition=" varbinary(255) NOT NULL")
String getName() {..}
void setName(..
}
[/code]

PS:
I *only* have problems when I am trying to update an object that contains special characters. However, I checked, the database (MySQL v 5.0.37) stores the values as UTF-8 - but for some reason, hibernate seems to interfere and scramble the id-string so that it thinks that the object containing the special chars should be inserted - even though it should be updated... anyone else experiencing this bug?