Toplink "update" descriptor event firing on deletion

Question

I've got a class for which I've defined actions for the pre-update, pre-insert, and post-delete descriptor events. Strangely, I see that when deleting an instance of this class, my pre-update action is called before the deletion is performed, then my post-delete action is called.
The ordering makes sense, but I'm wondering why the pre-update event fires at all? When viewing the resulting SQL (by turning on logging), I only see a DELETE statement.
Any thoughts?
Mark S

Answer 1

I assume this happens when you do a straight delete, and that you aren't updating the object before it gets deleted (i.e., sometimes a UOW will modify an object and then some part of the use case deletes it before the UOW commits).
In any case, I'm sure this was a concious decision and it's the kind of thing you don't want to change because no doubt there are people depending on it behaving that way :)
If it's turning into a headache (i.e., maybe you do a lot of expensive ops in the event), you might want to experiement with a couple things (I'm just thinking out loud here, not sure if this is a wild goose chase) --
Try unregistering the object. I.e., if you explicitly do a deleteObject, I think you can unregister the object in the UOW and then the delete will still happen (you might have to tell the UOW to performDeletesFirst though). This definitely won't work if the object is being deleted by de-associating a private relationship though, only if you explicitly call delete...
- Don