Cache merge-back on child delete redux in Toplink 10.1.3

Question

Hello. My team used to have issues in Toplink 9.0.4 with child objects still appearing on parent collections even after the children are deleted from the database, as discussed in this thread: Cache mismatch on child delete We never got a resolution to that issue. At some point, though, we got tired of using the merge-clone APIs and rewrote our application to avoid them. And after that rewrite, we never saw the phantom-deleted-child problem anymore.
Fast-forward to today. I'm trying to move this particular application from 9.0.4.5 to Toplink 10.1.3. Straight-forward mapping upgrade and no code changes. But a number of my tests are failing against 10.1.3 because of deleted child objects still existing on their parents' collections when the parents are read back through the cache, on specific examples of both 1:M and M:M mappings. I have not been able to come up with a simple test case that I can post, but here is our delete approach:
1. Acquire a unit of work from a ClientSession.
2. Read in ObjectToBeDeleted through the unit of work.
3. If ObjectToBeDeleted has a Parent, remove ObjectToBeDeleted from Parent's collection of children.
4. Call uow.deleteObject( ObjectToBeDeleted ).
5. Commit and observe that the correct SQL gets executed on the database.
Then I try this:
6. Read Parent from the ClientSession.
7. Look at its children -- ObjectToBeDeleted is still there.
But if I try this:
8. Read ObjectToBeDeleted out of the ClientSession directly rather than through Parent.
9. ObjectToBeDeleted is gone as I would expect.
Is there anything wrong with this approach that would cause the change I made to Parent at step 3 to not be reflected in the cache by step 6?
Thanks.
--Scott                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Answer 1

We are taking another run at TopLink 10.1.3 and have run into this problem again.
It turns out that this is fairly reproducable. It occurs when we remove the last item (or all of the items) from the parent collection.
It occurs with transparent indirection on or off.
I've added several tests to our Junit suite to detect this behavior with various objects. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they pass. Going back to TopLink 9, a couple of the tests that fail in 10 fail, but most of them pass.
Given the number of folks who shared our probem in TopLink9, I wonder how many have a similar problem in 10. I also wonder why the behavior differs somewhat between 9 and 10. Though our expanded test suite is now detecting the behavior in 9, it is less frequent.