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21.2. About Collections

Hibernate collections are considered to be a logical part of their owning entity and not of the contained entities. Be aware that this is a critical distinction that has the following consequences:
  • When you remove/add an object from/to a collection, the version number of the collection owner is incremented.
  • If an object that was removed from a collection is an instance of a value type (e.g. a composite element), that object will cease to be persistent and its state will be completely removed from the database. Likewise, adding a value type instance to the collection will cause its state to be immediately persistent.
  • Conversely, if an entity is removed from a collection (a one-to-many or many-to-many association), it will not be deleted by default. This behavior is completely consistent; a change to the internal state of another entity should not cause the associated entity to vanish. Likewise, adding an entity to a collection does not cause that entity to become persistent, by default.
Adding an entity to a collection, by default, merely creates a link between the two entities. Removing the entity will remove the link. This is appropriate for all sorts of cases. However, it is not appropriate in the case of a parent/child relationship. In this case, the life of the child is bound to the life cycle of the parent.
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