I have the following scenario and I cannot figure out how to set up the cascade.

I have a Customer object that "owns" a collection of Address objects. This relationship is handled from the Address side of things.

I also have a Contact object which I want to associate with an Address, but the Contact is not the parent of the address. I have a PrimaryAddress property on the Contact that holds a reference to the Address object. I am using the foreign-key approach to mapping this one-to-one relationship, which requires a PrimaryAddressID column in the Contacts table. So far, so good.

If I set Contact.PrimaryAddress = null, it works as expected and the PrimaryAddressID column is set to null. Assigning a valid Address object also works as expected.

However, I would like the PrimaryAddressID column to be set to null automatically if an Address is deleted from the parent Customer. Right, now, when I delete an address, the PrimaryAddress column in the Contacts table still has the ID of the deleted Address.

I did not want to put the cascade rule on the Contact mapping because the contact does not "own" the address. Also, I am not sure what cascade value I would use on the Address side of things to remove ID value from the Contacts table.

I am stuck on this one. Any help greatly appreciated!

Kevin

Kevin,

I do not have a solution here, but it is an interesting problem so I will ask a different question: if you want the Address deletion to change the Contacts table don't you need to create a link between the two in the java model? Is this something your model allows?

In this case the Address may be able to manage the relationship to Contacts.

Marius

I am working in .Net, but that should not matter. In my model, an Address must have a parent Customer, but may or may not be related to a Contact. The primary relationship is between Customer and Addresses. But, I want to be able to relate other objects in my model to an address. So, in the example I described, I may want a Contact to be associated to an Address, or some other object to be associated with an Address. These other objects may hold a reference to an Address, but if I delete a Contact for example, the Address would not be deleted. An address can only be deleted directly, or if the parent Customer is deleted.

So...
- An address is always associated with the parent Customer through a Customer property.
- An address may be associated with zero or more "other" objects, such as a Contact or another TBD object.

I am not worried about navigating from an Address to one of these other objects, just the other way around.

So, my problem is how to automatically manage the references to an Address in these other objects when the Address is deleted.

OR...

Maybe I should manage this relationship from the Address side of things. For example, an Address may have zero or more contacts associated with it. Maybe I need to simply map a one-to-many association from Address to Contact and a many-to-one association from Contact to Address. This turns around my original thinking, but it seems right.

Any more thoughts?

Kevin

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Oops, sorry for the language mismatch :)

I think it may prove useful in itself to link addresses to contacts, from an end user standpoint.

What will you do with the contacts that are not associated with an address? How will you get to them, will they just stay in the database and gather dust?

Another way to approach the problem is from the database side. Just create some triggers and be done with it :)

Marius

I forgot to mention that Contacts are also a child collection from Customer. I think I will go ahead and attempt to create the Address-Contacts relationship and see how it goes.

Thanks for your input!

Kevin