Is there a way to allow shared references to collections? Is there a reason for not allowing this, even when the collection is read-only(should nver be updated to database)?
Or do I have to remove the mappings and instead load these collections from hql? (Means a lot of code we'll have to change..)

Anybody out there with a solution to this problem? Been thinking about tweaking the hibernate code.

That depends what you mean be "shared references". There is a hibernate excpetion that mentions "shared references to a collection", and I'm guessing that that's what you're thinking of. However, it's a poorly-described exception, as the references are not shared, and that's the point.

It is fine to pass a persistent collection around to lots of places, sharing the use of a single instance. If you're doing that, continue doing it and all will be well. The problem occurs when you don't do that: when you have two distinct and separate references to a single collection. The most common way of getting into that situation is when you create a transient collection in transient object, then persist it and load it. The loaded collection is now the "real" collection, and the original collection should be immediately discarded. If you re-save that original object or collection you'll get the "shared reference" exception.

There is no way to allow two different java collections refer to a single persistent collection. There is no way for hibernate to synchronize something like that: what if you remove one item from one collection, and add a different item to the other collection, then save both.. what happens? If you want two references to the same collection, that's fine, the only problem is when you have two different java collections referring to the same set of DB rows.

If the collection is truly read-only, then either map it as mutable="false", or at least detach it from the session. The easiest way to detach the collection is to Hibernate.initialize it, then session.evict or session.clear.

I have getting "Found shared references to a collection" Same error is their any problem if i have written " hibernate.cache usage="read-only" include="all"" for that particular bean.
And this error got first time ever. So What will be problem .And What is solution to solve this?