We have a one-many relationship where the "many" items are dependent on each other, and we are using cascading delete to remove the "many" when the "one" is deleted.

E.g. We have a Shape object with a set of Points. One point is the "referencePoint" for another point. If we delete the shape we want to cascade the delete to the points, but if we delete the reference point first, we get a constraint violation.

The effect of all this is a constraint violation depending on the order of the deletes.

What are good ways to work around this? I'm thinking of using the interceptors somehow, or manually cascading this one item. I'm hoping people know best practices about how to do this.


Hibernate version:
3.1.2

if you have bi-directional relation with inverse="true" and cascade="all-delete-orphan", the way to delete either shape or point is as follows.

Thanks for the reply. My problem is different, however. When the parent is being deleted hibernate removes the children in the wrong order so the constraints between two children are violated.

I just overlooked this point

One point is the "referencePoint" for another point

if you dont mind, could you explain more?

Essentially we are using cascading delete to delete a bunch of "children" along with their "parents."

But the children have foreign key constraints among them (both within one parent and between children of different parents), and Hibernate is not ordering the deletes properly even when all related children are being deleted in one transaction.

So I'm leaning towards turning off cascading delete and implementing my own delete algorithm, but don't know how to do this. I'm looking into interceptors, but am open to any solution that will work.

A magic fix of some kind would be ideal, of course.