Trying (and having trouble understanding) to understand "inverse" ...

ou may map a bidirectional one-to-many association by mapping a one-to-many association to the same table column(s) as a many-to-one association and declaring the many-valued end inverse="true".

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<many-to-one name="Parent" column="parent_id" not-null="true"

(We also need to add the Parent property to the Child class.)

Now that the Child entity is managing the state of the link, we tell the collection not to update the link. We use the inverse attribute.

<set name="Children" inverse="true">
<key column="parent_id" />
<one-to-many class="Child" />
</set>

What's meant by "managing the state of the link"?

Reference:
http://nhibernate.sourceforge.net/nh-docs/en/html/single/reference.html#collections

THanks in advance!