Could somebody please tell me what the difference between each CascadeStyle is ? I'm especially looking for the difference between CascadeStyle.All and CascadeStyle.AllDeleteOrphan and also the difference between "CascadeStyle.Delete" and "CascadeStyle.DeleteOrphan"

What I'm seeing is that when I use CascadeStyle.All, if i delete a child from a Parent's child collection and say update on the Parent, it does not really delete the child, but this works fine when you use AllDeleteOrphan .. Also when you say Delete Orphan, when is an object considered Orphan ..

Tried googling the difference between these cascade styles but could not find any useful documentation anywhere.. Any help will be greatly appreciated

Also, could someone give me guidelines on when to use what Cascade Style ("All" /"AllDeleteOrphan" and "Delete"/"DeleteOrphan"))

Thanks

I'm not 100 percent sure, if my explanation is completely correct, but that's the way I understood cascading. With cascade, the operation you apply to the parent is cascaded to the childs. You do an update on the parent, so you get an cascaded update. If you want the child to be deleted, you have to delete the child explicitly or use cascade "AllDeleteOrphan" or "DeleteOrphan".

Have a look at http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/nhibernate/1.2/reference/en/html/example-parentchild.html. You'll find a pretty good example there. Especially "17.3 Cascading lifecycle".