Persistence through cascading should have higher precedence than orphan-delete ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Key: HHH-785 URL: http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HHH-785 Project: Hibernate3 Issue Type: Improvement Components: core Affects Versions: 3.1 beta 1 Reporter: Christian Bauer A typical tree mapped using an adjacency list: <many-to-one name="parent" cascade="none"/> <set name="children" cascade="all, delete-orphan"/> A normal tree operation is moving a node: a.remove(b); c.add(b); This results in an exception, as Hibernate currently rates the delete-orphan as more important and warns that the node would become persistent again through cascading. However, this is the only way to implement relocation of a node in a tree without resorting to complex session coding. I argue that the "delete orphans" guarantee given in the mapping should not have precedence over the the actual non-orphaned persistent state in the Session.