I have an entity called User that has several lazy loaded property relationships with other entities. I am using the OpenEntityManagerInView class in order to bind the hibernate session when each request comes into Struts2/Spring2.

The problem I am encountering is that during the login process, the User entity is queried but not fully populated because the additional relationships are not iterated during the login process. When the user navigates to another page, those properties are iterated from the cached user object that was stored in the session, but the page errors with a LazyInitializationException.

Is it possible to lazily initialize properties in this way between two requests to a Struts2/Spring web application?

Lazy initialization works only till the hibernate session is open. Once you close the hibernate session, lazy initialization cannot happen and ends up throwing LazyInitializationException. There are two solutions to this problem:
1) Keep the session open till you are sure you will not do any more lazy loading. This approach may not be useful for multi-tiered web applications as most applications will close the session in the model.
2) Use Hibernate.initialize(entity) to load you entity/relationships before closing your session. This is the usual approach that multi-tiered application use. In my application I use this approach. For details on inititalization please visit:
http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/core/3.3/reference/en/html/performance.html#performance-fetching-initialization

Hope that helps.