JPA Cascading Operations

In JPA, if any operation is applied on an entity then it will perform on that particular entity only. These operations will not be applicable to the other entities that are related to it.

To establish a dependency between related entities, JPA provides javax.persistence.CascadeType enumerated types that define the cascade operations. These cascading operations can be defined with any type of mapping i.e. One-to-One, One-to-Many, Many-to-One, Many-to-Many.

Cascade Enums

Following are the enums used to perform cascading operations.

Cascade Operations	Description
PERSIST	In this cascade operation, if the parent entity is persisted then all its related entity will also be persisted.
MERGE	In this cascade operation, if the parent entity is merged then all its related entity will also be merged.
DETACH	In this cascade operation, if the parent entity is detached then all its related entity will also be detached.
REFRESH	In this cascade operation, if the parent entity is refreshed then all its related entity will also be refreshed.
REMOVE	In this cascade operation, if the parent entity is removed then all its related entity will also be removed.
ALL	In this case, all the above cascade operations can be applied to the entities related to parent entity.