HIbernate Can't delete Entity with foreign key. Foreign key gets set to null

Question

This question has been asked in many forms here but none of the solutions seem to work for me. I\'m trying to delete the parent entity and I want all of the child entities to al

Answer 1

In Hibernate, you need to decide who is owning the relationship. If you have the parent side (ItemCategory) owning the relationship, you will find insertion/deletion of Item+ ItemCategory will involve update of item_id in ItemCategory table (which is what I observed from your exception). In most case it is not preferable. We usually let the children own the relationship. This is done by using mappedBy

(pseudo-code)

class Item {
  //...

  @OneToMany(mappedBy = "item", cascade=ALL, orphanRemoval=true)
  private Set categories;
}

class ItemCategory {
  //...

  @ManyToOne
  @JoinColumn(name="item_id")
  Item item;
}

The trick here is mappedBy