The Adobe docs are horribly confusing. The next sentence after the one you quoted is "For example, in ARTIST-ART relation, inverse should be set to true on the 'art' property in ARTIST." As you would certainly agree, in the ARTIST-ART association, the ARTIST is the "one" side and that's where they say you should set inverse="true".

For some reason they are trying to use "one" and "many" to reference the multiplicity of the property, rather than the number of objects. Still using ARTIST-ART, there is one ARTIST and many ARTs. The ART-to-ARTIST association is one-to-many. The inverse (ARTIST-to-ART) is many-to-one. However, the 'art' property on the ARTIST object is a collection.

Put in simpler terms, in a one-to-many relationship, the "one" side has a collection property and the "many" side has a non-collection property. Adobe is recommending the same thing, placing it on the "one" side (the side with the collection property). Why they have opted to use such counter-intuitive wording I have no idea.

That's the exact opposite side of the relationship that you're suggesting. Did you have any experiences which drove your personal preference for putting 'inverse' on the 'one' side of the relationship?

Thanks,
Eric P.

Ref. http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/Developing/WS5FFD2854-7F18-43ea-B383-161E007CE0D1.html

I wanted to make a slight correction to your comment "It's completely irrelevant which side you set it on. It just has to be set somewhere so that Hibernate only persists in one direction."

I believe that it is not completely irrelevant. I think setting inverse="true" on the wrong side will lead to less efficient database calls.

Sorry to be spamming your comments Barney! Again, thanks for your help!

Not to push you off, but I think it's time this migrate to the cf-orm-dev mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/cf-orm-dev). That'll be a much better format discussing a specific issue like this. When you post, make sure you include the property definitions of your entities, along with your helper methods. Without those it's hard to say what's happening.

oForum = entityNew("Forum");
oPost = entityNew("Post");

oForum.addPost(oPost);
oPost.setForum(oForum);

writeOutput("oForum.hasPost(oPost): " & oForum.hasPost(oPost));
writeOutput("oPost.hasForum(oForum): " & oPost.hasForum(oForum));

EntitySave(oForum);
EntitySave(oPost);

These are the results:
oForum.hasPost(oPost): YES
oPost.hasForum(oForum): NO

The ForumID is saved correctly to the Post table, but I can never get a Post to see it's parent Forum in the same request, even with an association management method (gets worse, they both result in NO). I thought this wouldn't be an issue if I set the relationship both ways??? Very frustrating.

So now I have to figure out which side should get this association management method. Maybe it's the side that has inverse="true"?