i just start to learn hibernate. i open a transaction every time i need to access the database and close the transaction after database returns the value. if works great when i retrieve everything. however, when i change to lazy loading, everything breaks. what can i do to solve the issue and what's the best practice on transaction open and close. i heard people mention spring is great dealing with transaction. is this true?

thanks

Hello.

Everything breaks is a bit vague expression, maybe you should post a exception stack here. :)

Also, it is most likely that after retrieving data you have closed the session, and because lazy loading is set, it didn't load properties that contain other domain objects.

Anyhow, this behavior is normal, you should read up a bit on using lazy loading, and either make session last longer (look up OSIV) or get what you need in your query while session is open.

As for Spring, yes it is great, and works well with Hibernate, especially with transactions (look up @Transactional). Look up some of those Spring/Hibernate tutorials out there.