How does passivation work?

[Cristian Donciulescu]

I am interested to know how does Orion Container treat the ejbPassivate method of an CMP entity-bean. Does it by any chance Deletes a record in the DB and then recreates it? The problem I'm facing is the following: I have a one-to-many relationship in the DB. I have one entity bean (A) that has a List member. The list member contains objects of class B. If I reinforce the FK constraint between the tables entity A and class B are stored in, I get an Oracle error stating the there was a FK violation, there were child records found. If I create the child table with the ON DELETE CASCADE directive, the error dissapears, but in the DB the child record is deleted and only the parent remains. The error is thrown immediately after the ejbPassivate is called. This suggests that during passivation the parent record is deleted and recreated. When the tables are created with ON DELETE CASCADE this works, although the child is permanently deleted. Otherwise, when trying to delete the parent Oracle reacts with an error that is caught by me. Is all this true? If yes, is there any way around it? Thanks, Cristi