This is directly taken from the Hibernate Doc:
Quote:
If the child object's lifespan is bounded by the lifespan of the parent object, make the parent a full lifecycle object by specifying CascadeType.ALL and org.hibernate.annotations.CascadeType.DELETE_ORPHAN (please refer to the Hibernate reference guide for the semantics of orphan delete)
But I'm assuming here that you are using Hibernate and not another implementation of JPA ...
Because not all implementations of JPA contains the DELETE_ORPHAN CascasdeType! (Actually Hibernate might even be the only one which has it ...)