JPA update many-to-many deleting records

Question

I have a @ManyToMany relationship between two entities. When I perform an update on the owning side, it appears that JPA deletes all the linked records from my database and re-inserts them. For me this is a problem because I have a MySQL trigger that fires before a record is deleted. Any ideas on how to get around this problem?

@Entity
public class User {

    @Id
    @Column(name="username")
    private String username;

    ...

    @ManyToMany
    @JoinTable(name="groups", joinColumns=
        @JoinColumn(name="username", referencedColumnName="username"),
            inverseJoinColumns=@JoinColumn(name="groupname",
                    referencedColumnName="type_id"))
    private List<UserType> types;

    ...

}

@Entity
public class UserType {

    @Id
    @Column(name="type_id")
    private String id;

    @ManyToMany(mappedBy="types")
    private List<User> users;

    ...
} 

Answer 1

It appears my problem was that I was not merging the entity.