Removing multiple items from a Grails One to Many relationship - grails

Question

I'm creating an application using Grails 2.2.4 and Java 7 (these are constraints I cannot change) and I run into an odd behavior when trying to delete multiple entries in a Many-To-Many hasMany Set.
I have a class named Sport that contains the following:
Class Sport{
String name
static hasMany=[category:Category]
static belongsTo = [Category]
}
And another one named Category:
Class Category{
String name
static hasMany=[sports:Sport]
}
Now when in my CategoryController I try to delete multiple Sport instances from sports, my code compiles and runs without errors, but for reason only one of the selected instances is actually deleted.
If I get a Sport list and a Category id from a form and try to run the following code on every objet in the list:
def categoryInstance = Category.get(idCategory)
def sportInstance = Sport.get(idSport)
if(sportInstance!=null){
categoryInstance.removeFromSports(sportInstance)
}
categoryInstance.save()
Only the last instance is deleted.
If I run
def categoryInstance = Category.get(idCategory)
def sportInstance = Sport.get(idSport)
if(sportInstance!=null){
categoryInstance.removeFromSports(sportInstance)
categoryInstance.save()
}
Only the first one is deleted.
Note that this code is run from within a for loop over the params.sport.toList() list.
My guess is that this is either due to the fact that my sports Set is somehow "changed" after the first deletion and therefore Hibernate can't find the next instance, or that my save method commits the first change then "forgets" the next.
Any advice on how I can delete more than one instance at a time?

Answer 1

A workaround is to wrap the code for deleting a single association in a block of withNewSession + withNewTransaction
Sport.withNewSession {
Sport.withNewTransaction {
//delete 1 association here
}
}
It's not very elegant but works. Beware of a potential performance impact, as this will likely have many database roundtrips.
I don't know why this problem occurs, and googling didn't help either.
Another solution = workaround is to explicitly map the relationship as SportCategory, which you can then delete like any other object with SportCategory.delete().