Methods, systems, and computer program products for programmatically enforcing referential integrity constraints defined for classes of an arbitrary modeling framework (such as the Meta Object Facility, or "MOF") when associations among class instances are modified. The present invention relieves the application programmer of the burden of writing code to maintain the links between instances, and applications are therefore considerably easier to write and to maintain, and programmatically maintains inverse links. This reduces the amount of data to be serialized, as the other link can be automatically resolved at the time the inverse link is reconstituted, and also helps in maintaining referential integrity among serialized instances (e.g. where associations are specified in one or more XML Metadata Interchange, or "XML", documents) because redundant information about the values of the same association will not have to be written across different documents or storage repositories.