2.2.5.4. Transitive persistence with cascading

You probably have noticed the cascade attribute taking an array of CascadeType as a value. The cascade concept in EJB3 is very is similar to the transitive persistence and cascading of operations in Hibernate, but with slightly different semantics and cascading types:

CascadeType.PERSIST: cascades the persist (create) operation to associated entities persist() is called or if the entity is managed
CascadeType.MERGE: cascades the merge operation to associated entities if merge() is called or if the entity is managed
CascadeType.REMOVE: cascades the remove operation to associated entities if delete() is called
CascadeType.REFRESH: cascades the refresh operation to associated entities if refresh() is called
CascadeType.ALL: all of the above

Please refer to the chapter 6.3 of the EJB3 specification for more information on cascading and create/merge semantics.