delete hibernate entity without (attempting to) delete association table (view) entry

Question

Entity A and B have a many to many relationship using link table AtoB.

If Entity A is deleted, the related links are deleted by hibernate. So far so good.

My problem is that my link table is a view hiding a much more complicated relationship and works perfectly in this situation except when hiberate tries to delete the link rows from the view, causing the database to complain.

@Entity A...   

@ManyToMany(fetch = FetchType.LAZY)
    @JoinTable(name = "AtoB", 
    joinColumns = @JoinColumn(name = "A_ID"), 
    inverseJoinColumns = @JoinColumn(name = "B_ID"))
 public Set<A> getASet() {
     return ASet;
 }

Is there a way to get hibernate to not delete the link rows? I haven't found any cascade options or the ability to use updateable=false etc on an association.

Cheers.

Answer 1

It sounds like you might be using the "link table" design incorrectly, if you want to model this as a ManyToMany relationship. You might want to look at breaking the extra items stored in this table into a separate table or storage.

Answer 2

Try this:

@ManyToMany(
    fetch = FetchType.LAZY,
    cascade = { CascadeType.MERGE, CascadeType.PERSIST, CascadeType.REFRESH })
...

See JPA Annotations for cascade types.