Allowing @OnDelete(action=CASCADE) with @ElementCollection and @ManyToMany allows us to optimize away the SQL delete statement which would otherwise be needed to remove the collection when its owner is remove()d.

The original issue description is long-obsolete, since Hibernate always cleans up @ElementCollections when the owner is deleted, except when you use a native SQL query. And this has been true for a very long time.

Original issue description below.

Consider the following constellation:

When I persist a Bar object that contains some Foos, and when I later decide to delete the Bar object, I get a foreign key constraint violation error message because the Foo objects, which contain a reference to the Bar object that owns them, are not deleted automatically. I would expect the default behaviour to be "on delete cascade" because the Foo objects are embeddables, thus they cannot exist on their own without the Bar object that owns them. But there is no way to tell Hibernate to cascade:

• the @OnDelete annotation is only allowed for OneToMany relations

• the @Cascade annotation is being ignored

• there is no "cascade" property for the CollectionOfElements

So my question is: Why does the cascading not occur automatically, and how do I tell Hibernate to cascade anyways?

Thanks a lot in advance,

Nicole