Hibernate - A collection with cascade=”all-delete-orphan” was no longer referenced by the owning entity instance

Question

I'm having the following issue when trying to update my entity:

"A collection with cascade=”all-delete-orphan” was no longer referenced by the owning entity instance".

I have a parent entity and it has a Set<...> of some children entities. When I try to update it, I get all the references to be set to this collections and set it.

The following code represents my mapping:

@OneToMany(mappedBy = "parentEntity", fetch = FetchType.EAGER)
@Cascade({ CascadeType.ALL, CascadeType.DELETE_ORPHAN })
public Set<ChildEntity> getChildren() {
    return this.children;
}

I've tried to clean the Set<..> only, according to this: How to "possible" solve the problem but it didn't work.

If you have any ideas, please let me know.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Check all of the places where you are assigning something to sonEntities. The link you referenced distinctly points out creating a new HashSet but you can have this error anytime you reassign the set. For example:

public void setChildren(Set<SonEntity> aSet)
{
    this.sonEntities = aSet; //This will override the set that Hibernate is tracking.
}

Usually you want to only "new" the set once in a constructor. Any time you want to add or delete something to the list you have to modify the contents of the list instead of assigning a new list.

To add children:

public void addChild(SonEntity aSon)
{
    this.sonEntities.add(aSon);
}

To remove children:

public void removeChild(SonEntity aSon)
{
    this.sonEntities.remove(aSon);
}