I have a one-to-many relationship between two classes.

I first create a object of the parent class and the populate the children set.
But when I try to persist the parent class I get a error message which says that the foreign key column in the children class cannot be null.

This issue is mentioned in the Hibernate documentation and I have tried to follow these guidelines without success.

What behavior should I expect from Hibernate ?

Is it not correct that it should be enough to persist the parent object only ?

I use a recent MySql database and the Hibernate template in the Spring framework.

Have there been any bugs reported/fixed one this issue recently?

Please follow the parent/child example chapter from the reference documentation step by step, without exception. There are no bugs in this.