@jmikola changed my mind, again. I think embedded documents should be able to be passed manually to the DocumentManager methods but it should not be necessary in most all cases since embedded documents cascade automatically. The only case I can think of is the case here where the user wants to effectively undo the remove() the UoW automatically did during the cascade operations. In order to do that the user would need be able to unschedule the embedded document for removal. Currently I think that is only possibly by passing the object to persist()