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20
Sep
2010

HibernateException – A collection with cascade=”all-delete-orphan” was no longer referenced by the owning entity instance

The logged exception

org.hibernate.HibernateException – “A collection with cascade=”all-delete-orphan” was no longer referenced by the owning entity instance: com.onkarjoshi.hibernate.test.Person.children”

Your likely problem

Looks like you have a Parent entity and a Child entity. The Parent has a collection of Child entities with cascade=”all-delete-orphan”.

You are setting a new collection via the setter thus leaving the original collection unreferenced by the Parent entity. This doesn’t fly well with Hibernate and leaves it confused about what to do.

parent.setChilden(new HashSet<Child>()); // This won’t work. Could be an ArrayList too.

parent.getChildren().clear(); // There, fixed that!

So generally speaking, just clear out the old collection, rather than dereferencing it and creating a new one.

Related posts:

  1. Garbage Collection, Reference types and Reachability – Strong, Soft, Weak, Phantom, Unreachable


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This entry was posted on Monday, September 20th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

22 Responses to “HibernateException – A collection with cascade=”all-delete-orphan” was no longer referenced by the owning entity instance”

  1. matt broekhuis October 21st, 2010 at 7:47 pm

    Thanks a ton! This should be higher up on the google ranks.

  2. Onkar Joshi November 1st, 2010 at 10:16 pm

    @Matt
    I hope Google has the same realization soon. :)

  3. Alan March 29th, 2011 at 2:49 pm

    Great. thanks for the solution

  4. Gustavo Freitas April 8th, 2011 at 1:51 am

    Hi,

    Isn’t it necessary to set the new referenced values? What If I’m updating a register for example and setting new values to the child?

  5. cbulga May 3rd, 2011 at 6:14 pm

    Thanks a lot! This saved me!

  6. kab May 9th, 2011 at 1:32 pm

    this saved me too！

  7. Onkar Joshi May 22nd, 2011 at 8:43 pm

    @Gustavo
    Sure. You can clear it and then add new values.

  8. Ravi July 1st, 2011 at 9:42 am

    Hi,

    Great Solution.. Thank you so much

  9. Aslam July 20th, 2011 at 8:06 pm

    Great Post !! Thanx alot!

  10. sreedhar August 5th, 2011 at 12:55 am

    I came across same error and for me it was kind of different issue and I solved it too..just to share it here in case if u come acros my scenario.

    For me this error happened, when i was tring to update the object using saveOrUpdate(), one of the sub-class key value was null and since it couldn’t find, it throwed error. once i assigned key value properly, error went away.

  11. Jasper August 12th, 2011 at 12:18 am

    sreedhar, dude ! Thank you soo much. Your comment made me think outside of my self-made box. For me the entity class that created the problem wasn’t directly related to the entity class of the field that was reported in the hibernate exception. So I first spend 6 hours assuming something was somehow touching the reference that the exception reports…had nothing to do with that reference but another reference in the same class.

  12. Nicholas Piasecki August 12th, 2011 at 11:29 pm

    You, sir, win the internets for this. Thanks!

  13. Ted November 12th, 2011 at 9:02 am

    Nice. Happend to me with the JPA annotation orphanRemoval=true over a Hibernate db. Made me question the need for the orphan removal at all – which I don’t think I need after all. Thanks

  14. Daniel Bryant November 18th, 2011 at 3:55 pm

    Very useful- many thanks! I have been having lots of issues attempting to update Collections managed by Hibernate, and blogs like this are helping me to gradually piece together the rules I should follow!

  15. Neuquino December 21st, 2011 at 10:50 pm

    Be careful, if the child collection is mapped as LAZY, clear() it will not work as expected.

  16. Kumar January 5th, 2012 at 12:17 pm

    Hi Neuquino,
    I’m facing same problem and in my casen child collection is mapped as LAZY=true..
    early suggestions would be appreciated.

  17. Nick January 7th, 2012 at 1:58 am

    Thanks a TON. For once, the solution I was looking for on Google was the first result.

  18. Ali January 10th, 2012 at 12:25 pm

    Great Solution. Thank you so much

  19. Jonny January 27th, 2012 at 10:41 am

    My child mapping is LAZY and I got around it by lazily initializing the setter.

    void setSet(Set set)
    {
    if (this.set == null)
    this.set = set;
    else
    {
    this.set.retainAll(set);
    this.set.addAll(set);
    }
    }

  20. ravi February 29th, 2012 at 10:33 am

    Thanks It really works..

  21. Tex July 16th, 2012 at 7:42 pm

    i have little different problem but it throws the same exception. i have a collection which i have to clear and repopulate everytime i save the parent object. and the primary key in collection is a composite key (made out of three columns).

  22. honeymon August 16th, 2012 at 10:52 am

    Thanks. ^^
    I solve my problem.

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