You need to call remove on the child from your application, perhaps from your parent's edit method. However there may be another solution, do you remove the child from the parent's collection? If you do then in TopLink Essentials this is called a private-owned relationship. The JPA spec does not have a concept of ownership but you can configure this in TopLink Essentials. If you use a DescriptorCustomizer in your persistence.xml for your parent class, you can access the children OneToMany mapping and set it is be privateOwned. i.e. public void MyCustomizer implements DescriptorCustomizer { public void customize(ClassDescriptor descriptor) { OneToManyMapping mapping = (OneToManyMapping)descriptor.getMappingForAttributeName("children"); mapping.privateOwnedRelationship(); } } ------ http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/People/JamesSutherland James Sutherland TomSimmons wrote:I am using EJB3 and Toplink. I have a parent entity and a child entity that is a one to many, the child has the cascade=all defined, and the parent has a collection for all the children that belong to it. I can happily add children, and call either the create (persist) or edit (merge) methods in the facades and the parent and children will correctly be saved to the database, with the correct ID's in the children pointing to the parent. What I need to do though is be able to delete a child by saving the parent if the child has been marked for deletion. The system doesn't performing the deletes/adds as it goes, but instead waits until the page is submitted. So what I thought was when I save the parent, I would be able to add something into create/edit methods of the child facade class that would check a transient field and if it said delete would instead call the remove method. However by adding break points in the the three persistence methods of the child facade, I can see that when calling the edit of the parent, none of these methods are used. Any ideas?