How to disable cascade delete or update programmatically

batmat · **Posted:** Wed Jun 28, 2006 11:30 am

Hi all,

I am working with a entity graph. My A entity class contains sets of B which contains sets of C.

Mapping : All of this is mapped birectionnally (<set ...> in the parent with cascade="all,delete-orphan", <many-to-one ...> in each child).

I modified a property of B. So I call

Code:

Session.update(myInstance);

to update the B class.

The thing is : I'm working one copies of entities. So there's no way to detect the changes (i.e. I'm not working with proxified objects) that have been done.

I know that the method I'm coding will actually only affect fields of B class, none of the parent one (A) or one of the children (in the C set).

So in this method, I'd like to be able to disable the cascade mode and set it for this time to cascade="none" to be sure that the update will only affect the B table.

In fact, without doing it, because my object is a copy of the old retrieved B entity, when I update the B object, an update is called for each of the C element 'cause H3 can't know it has changed or not and the cascade mode is "all,delete-orphan"...

To sum up : is there a method to temporarily disable cascading ? Like the setFetchMode() method can change the default lazy behaviour given in the hbm files ?

Thanks a lot.

Hibernate version: 3.1.1

tenwit · **Joined:** Thu Dec 23, 2004 9:08 pm **Posts:** 2008

No, I don't think so. But there is a nifty workaround that I use. Change the cascade in your mapping to be explicit about the cascade ops: use cascade="save,merge,update,delete,delete-orphan" etc. etc., but leave out cascade mode "replicate". Then when you save your (detached) copy object, don't attach it first, save it using replicate (ReplicationMode.OVERWRITE). And it won't cascade. When you want the cascade, just reattach the object, then save in the normal fashion.