I have the following scenario. A User has several Roles. The relationship between user and role is defined as a bi-directional many-to-many relationship.

• User A has Role A.

• To retrieve Roles use :
  User userA = ....
  Roles roles = userA.getRoles()

• Then I contruct a new user and assign roles to it
  User userB = new User();
  userB.setRoles(userA.getRoles());

• Then I pass my use to the UserManagerBean to persist it
  UserManager.createNewUser(userB);

-At this point what I percieve is happening is that all the roles which were previously associated with userA are now reassigned to userB. I have tried retrieving the "new" roles which resulted in :

User userB = new User();
userB.setRoles(UserManager.getRoles());

• In this case the behaviour was correct

The relationship between user and roles is a ManyToMany relationship without cascading and I am useing JBoss 4.0.3 RC 1 on JDK 1.5.0_04 on Windows XP.

Any suggestions on this. I believe this to be a bug.