Owner in ManyToMany Relationships

Question

Hello all,
I need to create a many to many relation between some roles and some policies.
I do not want to cascade PERSIST, or REMOVE. So when creating the relation both the Policies and Roles involved are in the database.
Also the relation are done in a stand alone client, so the objects become dettached.
So this is the issue:
In the first case the Role entity is the owner.
On the client side:
role.getPolicies().add( policy );
remoteSessionBean.updateObject( role ); //executes remotely on the server.All is fine. The role/policy association in saved into the database.
Now if do:
policy.getRoles().add( role );
remoteSessionBean.updateObject( policy ); The relation is not created in the database :(.
If I make the policy object the owner of the manytomany then the two exemple are reversed: it works when updating the relation via policy, but it does not work when updated via role.
Is there any way to make it work both at the same time. The GUI allows the user to eiter add roles to a policy and then save the policy, or to add policy to a roles and then save the roles.
Thank you for your time,
- Ilie

Answer 1

The Hibernate documentation states that in a bidirectional relationship both entities need to be updated.
So the code should look somethig like:
role.getPolicies().add(  policy );
policy.getRoles().add( role );
remoteSessionBean.update( role );
remoteSessionBean.update( policy );Unless anyone has a better idea this is the only way...