I think I am misunderstanding a limitation of cascading when persisting an object into the database.

Scenario: An Invoice containing many LineItems.

From the docs I see:

- One to many relationships must have 'inverse' on the many side. Meaning that the Invoice side of the mapping must be set to 'inverse'.

- The inverse side is not cascaded when adding entries into a database.

That seems to imply that I cannot simply session.persist(invoice) and have all the line items added. Instead, it seems to indicate that I must first persist the invoice, then loop through the line items and persist each of them.

Is that correct? I hope not... it seems inefficient. Or perhaps there's another way to accomplish a 1-step persist result?

submit misfire...

Surely, the 'many' side is the LineItem? not the 'Invoice'?

Actually... as generated by Hibernate Tools... the many side (and inverse) is the invoice. I presume because one invoice has many line items, while a line item belongs to one and only one invoice.

And because of the inverse... if I persist invoice, the line items are not... I have to persist the invoice, then loop through the line items to persist each one. If I don't loop, the database shows no line items.

... feels unnatural... hence my question.

"as generated by Hibernate Tools"; does this mean reveng?

I use reveng to generate my java code, and the class with the collection is annotated:


And the items are:


In my [limited] experience, if you add LineItems to the invoice.getLineItems() Set, and then update(invoice) the right thing happens.
Assuming the LineItem you add is correctly created with reference back to the Invoice.

Hibernate Tools is a download on the Hibernate site, listed with the Hibernate core, Annotations, etc. It is an Eclipse plugin, that among other things allows generating the hibernate-cfg.xml, HBM.xml files, Java classes and DAOs. I have not looked at reveng.

From the fact that reveng generates annotations and Hibernate Tools does not, I presume that Hibernate Tools is not as up to date as reveng. Perhaps they were in a rush to release a new version of the core and did it without waiting for the corresponding updates across the board?

'reveng' is an ant target that invokes the reverse-engineering tools inside hibernatetools.
I use it direct from ant script. (as an emacs user, i can't quite abide Eclipse...)

still uses hbm2hbmxl and hbm2cfgxml and then hbm2java
I don't recall exactly what triggers the Annotation generation...

Anyway, mostly to reassure you that persisting of the Set should work if configured correctly.

(you might post details of your config/markup/code, others may spot the problem)