Is there a way to define a foreign key constraint (forbid to delete rows that are foreign keys in other rows) with Hibernate?

@ForeignKey only seems to overwrite key names for relationships.

No responses - then I take that as a "no, it's not possible". Astonishing...

Hi,
if you create a One-to-One, one-to-many or many-to-one relationship you are creating a foreign key with just the effect you describe!?

With the "cascade" attribute you can finetune it's behaviour.

So I don't really understand what you are missing.

Thanks, so how would you use "cascade" to model the foreign key restriction as outlined above?

I know that e.g. cascade = CascadeType.ALL would result in updates or deletes of the related table but how to define that a delete of a row is NOT possible if its id is still a foreign key of another row?

If a PARENT has CHILDS I want to prevent the deletion of a PARENT as long as there are CHILDS that belong to that PARENT.

To make that clearer: I want that it is not even possible to delete these rows working outside of Hibernate, I want a real database constraint.

If you don't specify any specific cascade you will get such a constraint at least with a Oralce10 Database (that's what we use).

Good hint, does not work with MySQL (at least MYISAM, maybe INNODB does). That's why I thought I might have missed something.

Thanks