I am using EJB3 and Toplink.

I have a parent entity and a child entity that is a one to many, the
child has the cascade=all defined, and the parent has a collection for
all the children that belong to it.

I can happily add children, and call either the create (persist) or
edit (merge) methods in the facades and the parent and children will
correctly be saved to the database, with the correct ID's in the
children pointing to the parent.

What I need to do though is be able to delete a child by saving the
parent if the child has been marked for deletion.

The system doesn't performing the deletes/adds as it goes, but instead
waits until the page is submitted.  So what I thought was when I save
the parent, I would be able to add something into create/edit methods
of the child facade class that would check a transient field and if it
said delete would instead call the remove method.

However by adding break points in the the three persistence methods of
the child facade, I can see that when calling the edit of the parent,
none of these methods are used.

Any ideas?