# How to soft delete a child entity to allow the client to review it before it finally gets deleted
**URL:** https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/how-to-soft-delete-a-child-entity-to-allow-the-client-to-review-it-before-it-finally-gets-deleted/1695
**Category:** Hibernate ORM
**Created:** [November 13, 2018, 1:52pm UTC](https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/how-to-soft-delete-a-child-entity-to-allow-the-client-to-review-it-before-it-finally-gets-deleted/1695 "2018-11-13T13:52:50Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@guibernardi](https://discourse.hibernate.org/u/guibernardi)
#### Post date: [November 13, 2018, 1:52pm UTC](https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/how-to-soft-delete-a-child-entity-to-allow-the-client-to-review-it-before-it-finally-gets-deleted/1695/1 "2018-11-13T13:52:50Z")
Hi,
I have a process of Orders where I load Order and all their OrdemItem, and I’m having problems with this situation:
**Order: PK[id = 1];**
**OrderItem: PK[order\_id = 1, order\_line = 1];**
**OrderItem: PK[order\_id = 1, order\_line = 2];**
So I remove the Object (**OrderItem: PK[order\_id = 1, order\_line = 1]**), only in collection because I don’t want to delete in database before the user confirm the whole process. But for any reason the user add the same OrderItem again in the collection.
If I merge the father (Order) after that I’m getting:
```auto
A different object with the same identifier value was already associated with the session
```
If I remove the OrderItem in database when I remove it from the collection it works, but I want to keep it in the database because the user could abort the process.
Is there any elegant approach to do this with Hibernate? Or should I do a workaround with @Transient attribute or another collection?
Thanks in advance
---
### Author:  [@vlad](https://discourse.hibernate.org/u/vlad)
#### Post date: [November 13, 2018, 2:12pm UTC](https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/how-to-soft-delete-a-child-entity-to-allow-the-client-to-review-it-before-it-finally-gets-deleted/1695/2 "2018-11-13T14:12:08Z")
> [@guibernardi](#):
>
> If I merge the father (Order) after that I’m getting:
That doesn’t happen with `merge`, but with `Session#update` or `Session#saveOrUpdate`.
> If I remove the OrderItem in database when I remove it from the collection it works, but I want to keep it in the database because the user could abort the process.
You need to use a `state` property in this case which is an Enum and takes values like:
- VALID
- REMOVING
- REMOVED
This way you can allow the user to review it prior to finally deleting it or changing it to the `REMOVED` state.
> Is there any elegant approach to do this with Hibernate? Or should I do a workaround with @Transient attribute or another collection?
There’s always an elegant solution with JPA and Hibernate. In this case, you could use the Hibernate `@Filter` to dynamically load the `OrderItem` based on their `status`. For more details, check out the [User Guide](http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/5.3/userguide/html_single/Hibernate_User_Guide.html#mapping-column-filter).
---
### Author:  [@guibernardi](https://discourse.hibernate.org/u/guibernardi)
#### Post date: [November 13, 2018, 3:44pm UTC](https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/how-to-soft-delete-a-child-entity-to-allow-the-client-to-review-it-before-it-finally-gets-deleted/1695/3 "2018-11-13T15:44:36Z")
Thank you, I’ll check and use @Filter