JPA 2.1 ManyToOne, delete child (one side) if is last entity

Question

An Article has a unidirectional ManyToOne relationship to Medium , which is working fine with the code below: saving and deleting articles succeeds.

I wonder if JPA has an elegant way to delete the last child entity, medium in this case. Atm, if I delete all articles with a specific medium, the medium is not removed from the DB. I could check manually of course, but I presume there's a better way.

@Entity
public class Article {

    @ManyToOne(cascade = CascadeType.PERSIST)
    private Medium medium; // e.g. media website, facebook, twitter...

}


@Entity
public class Medium {

    ...

}

Answer 1

Have a look at this question . In short it is not possible because because JPA does not know about the number of children, thus you have to check it yourself.