OpenJPA orphan removal not working

Question

I am trying out a master child test case with a OneToMany unidirectional relationship. I have a scenario where I want to update the master by removing some entries from the children list. When I do a merge, I want these child entries to be automatically deleted.

I have tried in vain to get this working. I tried orphanremoval too, but that too didn't help. There were some suggestions to add equals and hashcode, which didn't work either.

Any hint or help in this regard is highly appreciated. Thank you.

I am using JPA2.0 with OpenJPA 2.1.0

Here is my code.

//Parent class
public class Account {
    private String accountId;
    private String accountNumber;
    private List<SubAccount> subAccounts;

    //followed by getters/setters 
}

//Child class
public class SubAccount {
    private String subAccountId;
    private String subAccountNumber;
    //followed by getters/setters 
}

My orm.xml is as follows.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<entity-mappings version="2.0"
    xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/orm" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/orm http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/orm_2_0.xsd">

    <entity name="Account" class="test.data.Account">
        <table name="ACCOUNT" />

        <sequence-generator name="AccountSeq"
            sequence-name="ACCOUNT_TEST_SEQ" />

        <attributes>

            <id name="accountId">
                <column name="ACCOUNT_ID" />
                <generated-value strategy="SEQUENCE" generator="AccountSeq" />
            </id>

            <basic name="accountNumber">
                <column name="ACCOUNT_NO" />
            </basic>

            <one-to-many name="subAccounts" fetch="EAGER"
                target-entity="test.data.SubAccount" orphan-removal="true" >
                <join-column name="ACCOUNT_ID" referenced-column-name="ACCOUNT_ID" nullable="false" updatable="true"/>
                <cascade>
                    <cascade-all />
                </cascade>
            </one-to-many>

        </attributes>
    </entity>

    <entity name="SubAccount" class="test.data.SubAccount">
        <table name="SUBACCOUNT" />

        <sequence-generator name="SubAccountSeq"
            sequence-name="SUBACCOUNT_TEST_SEQ" />

        <attributes>
            <id name="subAccountPK">
                <column name="SUBACCOUNT_ID" />
                <generated-value strategy="SEQUENCE" generator="AccountSeq" />
            </id>
            <basic name="subAccountNumber">
                <column name="SUBACCOUNT_NO" />
            </basic>
        </attributes>
    </entity>

</entity-mappings>

And this is what I am trying to do.

Account acc = (Account)entityMgr.find(Account.class, "1100")
acc.getSubAccounts().remove(0);
entityMgr.merge(acc)

I expect the subaccount to be deleted.

Answer 1

OpenJPA overrides the orphan-removal behavior if the cascade type is set to cascade-all or cascade-remove.

Instead of cascade-all, I had to configure cascade-type with cascade-persist, cascade-merge, cascade-refresh and cascade-detach.