I have this problem. Let's have two entities, for example Car and Person. One person can own n cars, a car can be owned by one person, so it's one-to-many association. The association is unidirectional, you can obtain owner from , but you can't get list of cars from Person.

And now here's the problem. I need to remove Car and Person entities in this way:

1, when you remove a Car, his owner is not removed.
2, when you remove a Person, all his cars are removed.

I was able to solve the first point by simply removing CascadeType from the @ManyToOne annotation, so the removing of a Car doesn't remove the owner.


But I can't solve the second point, I can't add CascadeType.REMOVE to the Person class, because the association is unidirectional, so I dont use @OneToMany annotation there.

Thanks for your help!

Why your link must be unidirectional?

I wanted to know, if there is a way to do it with just a unidirectional association. I don't need the bidirectional one in my application.

Hmm...

1) Have your database do it using a cascading foreign key constraint.
2) Use <sql-delete> in your class mapping. Never tried this, but I suppose it might work.

If the only reason for the unidirectionality is "curiosity" i suggest you to go with the bidirectional thing, it will give you more flexibility in the future... And you'll get the cascade actions easily and naturally... so you can use hbm2ddl without messing with the DB schema yourself.

can anybody help to solve this problem?
Not a curiosity. If I use bidirectional I'll have lots of dummy properties in classes %(

What about a delete orphan cascade type?

DELETE_ORPHAN is a OneToMany option which does nothing for ManyToOne. isn't it?