Check all of the places where you are assigning something to sonEntities. The link you referenced distinctly points out creating a new HashSet but you can have this error anytime you reassign the set. For example:
public void setChildren(Set<SonEntity> aSet)
{
this.sonEntities = aSet; //This will override the set that Hibernate is tracking.
}
Usually you want to only “new” the set once in a constructor. Any time you want to add or delete something to the list you have to modify the contents of the list instead of assigning a new list.
To add children:
public void addChild(SonEntity aSon)
{
this.sonEntities.add(aSon);
}
To remove children:
public void removeChild(SonEntity aSon)
{
this.sonEntities.remove(aSon);
}