Hi there,

I have a User class with subclasses Client and Admin. In code I am trying to fetch a user with a particular id and then perform some action depending on the class of the user. Using instanceof method does not work as the object can be a hibernate proxy. Setting lazy=false in User class mapping is not an option for me due to performance requirements.

Is there an easy way for me force hibernate to initialize the proxy before using instanceof method? I have tried using Hibernate.initialize method but it does not seem to do anything. The session is open throughout the lifetime of the request.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
-jas

It is possible to delve into the Hibernate-generated proxy to the get the underlying instance. Something like this:

Thank you. That works wonderfully.

-jas

I'm having this issue as well and I would be grateful for some indication as to why the initialize method does not return the underlying object, instead of the proxy. I'm clearing my session and this is all being done within a transaction. There's no cache in my application.

I am not sure why the initialize method doesn't work. Perhaps someone else can shed some more light on it.
But as suggested by nordborg, I wrote a utility method to initialize objects:

import org.hibernate.proxy.HibernateProxy;
...
public static Object initializeProxy(Object object) {
if (object instanceof HibernateProxy) {
HibernateProxy proxy = (HibernateProxy) object;
object = proxy.getHibernateLazyInitializer().getImplementation();
return object;
}
return object;
}
...

I am quite sure that the initialize method works (eg. it initializes the proxy or collection). The reason that it doesn't return the actual underlying instance is probably that the Hibernate developers don't want to break object identity within a session. At least that's my guess. On the other hand, object identity can be broken in other ways as described in http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/core/3. ... ng-proxies Unfortunately that "workaround" can't be used to determine the actual subclass.