Hibernate Tips: How to delete child entities from a many-to-one association

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Hibernate Tips is a series of posts in which I describe a quick and easy solution for common Hibernate questions. If you have a question for a future Hibernate Tip, please leave a comment below.

Question:

My domain model contains a many-to-one association in which the child entity can’t exist without its parent. Can Hibernate automatically delete the child entity if I remove its association to the parent?

Solution:

Yes, the JPA specification provides the orphanRemoval feature for these use cases. When you activate it on the association, Hibernate removes a child entity when you remove its association to the parent entity.

Let’s take a look at an example.

In most online book stores, customers can review the offered books. You can model that with a Book and a Review entity and a one-to-many association between them.

It doesn’t make any sense to store a Review that’s not associated with a Book. So, you should set the orphanRemoval attribute of the @OneToMany association to true. And you also need to set the cascade attribute to CascadeType.PERSIST or CascadeType.ALL.

@Entity
public class Book {

	@OneToMany(mappedBy = "book", orphanRemoval = true, cascade = CascadeType.PERSIST)
	private List<Review> reviews = new ArrayList<Review>();
	
	...
}

When you now remove a Review entity from the association that’s modeled by the List reviews attribute, Hibernate will delete the Review entity from the database.

em = emf.createEntityManager();
em.getTransaction().begin();

Book b = em.find(Book.class, 1L);
b.getReviews().remove(0);

em.getTransaction().commit();
em.close();

As you can see in the following log messages, Hibernate performs 2 SQL SELECT statements to get the Book entity with id 1 and all associated Review entities. And when I commit the transaction, it also performs an SQL DELETE operation to remove the Review entity from the database.

14:12:57,197 DEBUG [org.hibernate.SQL] - select book0_.id as id1_0_0_, book0_.title as title2_0_0_, book0_.version as version3_0_0_ from Book book0_ where book0_.id=?
14:12:57,201 DEBUG [org.hibernate.SQL] - select reviews0_.fk_book as fk_book3_1_0_, reviews0_.id as id1_1_0_, reviews0_.id as id1_1_1_, reviews0_.fk_book as fk_book3_1_1_, reviews0_.comment as comment2_1_1_ from Review reviews0_ where reviews0_.fk_book=?
14:12:57,212 DEBUG [org.hibernate.SQL] - delete from Review where id=?

Learn more:

If you want to learn more about association mappings with JPA and Hibernate, you should also take a look at the following posts:

• I wrote a broader introduction to JPA’s relationship mappings in Ultimate Guide: Association Mappings with JPA and Hibernate
• And if you’re already familiar with the basic association mappings, you might be interested in this post about general best practices for mapping one-to-many and many-to-one associations.