DeleteById is not deleting exisiting Relationships

[MaltePetersen]

I user spring-boot-starter-data-neo4j version 2.4.5

If I try to delete a Pojo like this:

         pojoRepository.deleteById(pojo.getCompletePath());

The pojo is deleted but the attributes still exist. Shouldnt the attributes get deleted together with the pojo?

Something similar happens if I try to update the pojo with save:

var pojo = pojoRepository.findById(completePath);
       pojo.setAttributes(Collections.emptySet());
       pojoRepository.save(pojo);

If I do this the pojo itself is updated and is not related anymore to the attributes, but the attributes still exist as nodes.

My PojoNode looks like this:

@Node
public class Pojo {

    private boolean emptyHull;

    @Id
    private String completePath;
    private String className;
    private Package aPackage;
    @Version
    private Long version;

    @Relationship(type = "attributes")
    private Set<Attribute> attributes = Collections.emptySet();

    @Relationship(type = "parent")
    private Pojo parentClass;

    @Relationship(type = "interfaces")
    private Set<String> interfaces = Collections.emptySet();

My AttributeNode looks like this:

@Node
public class Attribute {

    @Id
    private String id;
    @Version
    private Long version;
    private String name;
    private String accessModifier;
    //isOnlySet if the class is of type java.util.list
    private Pojo genericType;

    @Relationship("DeclaringClass")
    private Pojo clazz;

I thought maybe it is supposed to work like this because an Attribute Node still has other relationsships after it was deleted or maybe I need to set the relationship direction in some way for sdn to understand that I want it to delete all Attributes of an pojo if I delete a pojo.

[gerrit_meier · Accepted solution]

There is at the moment no support for cascading deletes in Spring Data Neo4j. One of the reasons is that often SDN-based applications are not the only consumers of the database and we cannot foresee the impact an implicit delete on a node might have.
In those cases you would have to manually delete the previously attached nodes.