Hello,

I'm using a many-to-one relationship with the inverse attribute on the many side.

Since it is not possible to set the attribute true to the one side how can I make Hibernate insert the collection from the many side and not the one side.

Indeed, my problem is similar to the example of Hibernate in Action on page 109. But when I insert (corresponding to the example) the Item in the DB I would like Hibernate by cascade insert automatically the collection Bids because once the Item is persistent, the collection bids won't change.

Presently, if I insert the Item in the database, the collection obviously won't be inserted because of the inverse="true" which means I have to iterate on the collection and to insert a bid one by one.

I hope I'm clear.

The parameter inverse="true" only affects who writes the column that maps the relationship. You can use cascade="save-update" in the one side and the collection will be saved automatically.


Here is an example:


When you save an object of class Father, Hibernate cascades the save to the children collection and saves all the Child objects linked to it.

Thank you for your message.

I did set the cascade attribute to save-update but when insering the Father and processing with the children, I got a message informing me that the collection was [<unreferenced>].

As you said, the inverse attribute affects who writes the column but if this attribute is set to "true" it means the Father won't write the column even if the cascade attribute is set to save-update which is my case.

dprotas, you were right.

It did not work because I had set the default-cascade attribute to true and not the specific cascade attribute of the collection.

However, I still can't understand the inverse attribute.
In the book "Hibernate in Action" page 109, it is said that "if we only call item.getBids().add(bid), no changes will be persistent".

In our case, it's .

Put away the book. Open the Hibernate reference documentation. There is a chapter called "Parent Child Example". Do this step-by-step without changing the code or doing anything else. After you have done this, go to the Hibernate website and search for "inverse". Open the first page in the result and read it.