Owning Side and Inverse Side of JPA entity relationships

Entity relationships may be bidirectional or unidirectional. A bidirectional relationship has both an owning

side and an inverse side. A unidirectional relationship has only an owning side. The owning side of a

relationship determines the updates to the relationship in the database.

 

The following rules apply to bidirectional relationships:

 

• The inverse side of a bidirectional relationship must refer to its owning side by use of the mappedBy element of the OneToOne, OneToMany, or ManyToMany annotation. The mappedBy element designates the property or field in the entity that is the owner of the relationship.
• The many side of one-to-many / many-to-one bidirectional relationships must be the owning side, hence the mappedBy element cannot be specified on the ManyToOne annotation.
• For one-to-one bidirectional relationships, the owning side corresponds to the side that contains the corresponding foreign key.
• For many-to-many bidirectional relationships either side may be the owning side.

The cascade=REMOVE should only be applied to associations that are specified as

OneToOne or OneToMany. Applications that apply cascade=REMOVE to other associations are not portable.