I was trying to do a Many-to-many setup with a link entity (as described in the manual).

Using the entities from the manual, when I call Session.merge after assigning an Address to a Person, Hibernate attempts to insert a (null, null) tuple into the link table. The problem only affects merge – persist seems to work fine.

I've stepped through it with a debugger and it seems, that SessionImpl.instantiate (called during the cascading merge) does not copy over the two @Id fields.

I've reproduced it with 5.2.2, 5.2.1 and 5.0.9, with both PostgreSQL and H2. Both databases won't insert the null values into the primary key, of course.