Is there anyone that can tell me the best way to handle cascading deletes for detached objects? i.e. i want the deleted objects in a composite collection to be persisted.

It's my understanding that the only way to get hibernate to cascade deletes on a detached object is to use session.merge instead of session.update. Unfortunately, this has the unwanted side effect of not reflecting updated timestamp values in the parent object.

I've posted more details on the issue here:
http://www.jmpj.net/jason/index.cfm/200 ... and-tricks

I'm caught in a paradox. If I use merge I have to manually refresh my object to retrieve the new timestamp. If I use update i have to manually cascade any deleted collection elements.

Hi,
Can you pls post a piece of test code on how you expect to persist your composite entity?