What is the meaning of the CascadeType.ALL for a @ManyToOne JPA association

The meaning of CascadeType.ALL is that the persistence will propagate (cascade) all EntityManager operations (PERSIST, REMOVE, REFRESH, MERGE, DETACH) to the relating entities.

It seems in your case to be a bad idea, as removing an Address would lead to removing the related User. As a user can have multiple addresses, the other addresses would become orphans. However the inverse case (annotating the User) would make sense - if an address belongs to a single user only, it is safe to propagate the removal of all addresses belonging to a user if this user is deleted.

BTW: you may want to add a mappedBy="addressOwner" attribute to your User to signal to the persistence provider that the join column should be in the ADDRESS table.

See here for an example from the OpenJPA docs. CascadeType.ALL means it will do all actions.

Quote:

CascadeType.PERSIST: When persisting an entity, also persist the entities held in its fields. We suggest a liberal application of this cascade rule, because if the EntityManager finds a field that references a new entity during the flush, and the field does not use CascadeType.PERSIST, it is an error.

CascadeType.REMOVE: When deleting an entity, it also deletes the entities held in this field.

CascadeType.REFRESH: When refreshing an entity, also refresh the entities held in this field.

CascadeType.MERGE: When merging entity state, also merge the entities held in this field.

Sebastian

You shouldn't use CascadeType.ALL on @ManyToOne since entity state transitions should propagate from parent entities to child ones, not the other way around.

The @ManyToOne side is always the Child association since it maps the underlying Foreign Key column.

Therefore, you should move the CascadeType.ALL from the @ManyToOne association to the @OneToMany side, which should also use the mappedBy attribute since it's the most efficient one-to-many table relationship mapping.