JPA - Persisting a One to Many relationship

You have to set the associatedEmployee on the Vehicle before persisting the Employee.

Employee newEmployee = new Employee("matt");
vehicle1.setAssociatedEmployee(newEmployee);
vehicles.add(vehicle1);

newEmployee.setVehicles(vehicles);

Employee savedEmployee = employeeDao.persistOrMerge(newEmployee);

One way to do that is to set the cascade option on you "One" side of relationship:

class Employee {
   // 

   @OneToMany(cascade = {CascadeType.PERSIST})
   private Set<Vehicles> vehicles = new HashSet<Vehicles>();

   //
}

by this, when you call

Employee savedEmployee = employeeDao.persistOrMerge(newEmployee);

it will save the vehicles too.