Hierarchical Deletion w Cascaded TRIGGERS in SE

Using Informix-SE and ESQL/C v5.01 I have several tables organised in a hierarchical (tree) fashion: a parent has multiple children, which in turn have multiple children, by defining referential constraints on foreign keys. I would like to define cascaded TRIGGERS such that by deleting a record in the top-most parent table, all related records in children tables will be recursively deleted. Furthermore, I would like to be able to delete multiple parent records in one SQL statement. The TRIGGER can be defined as follows: CREATE TRIGGER del_parent DELETE ON parent REFERENCING OLD AS pre_del FOR EACH ROW (DELETE FROM child WHERE foreign_key = pre_del.key); The problem is that the for each parent row, the trigger action (deleting the child records) will take place AFTER the trigger event (deleting the parent record). This violates referential constraints since the parent record cannot be deleted while it is still referenced by child records. Can anybody suggest a solution, other than using the OnLine server, or doing the work manually ? Any suggestions will be appreciated. Johnny Farraj johnny@aztech.demon.co.uk