Is it possible to set the child entity's @Id for a lazily fetched collection? I assume the child entity id is fetch when fetching the parent entity.

I would like to return a reference to the child entities in my rest service. For this to be possible, I would need the child.id property to be set for any lazy loaded collections/entities.

I'm using spring data jpa and hibernate.

Is there a way to specify a default entity graph for lazy loaded entities and a different entity graph for when the entity is eager fetched? Any other ways to solve this?

Lazily fetched child collections are fetched fully when being navigated. More, if you have a parent entity, you need to run a query to fetch all child entity identifiers.



That's not true. The child side @ManyToOne association is a FK to the parent entity PK. If you only fetch the parent table row, there's no way you also fetch the child entity identifier. The reverse is true. If you fetch the child table row, then you already know the associated parent entity PK.



Yes, you can. Just follow these steps:

1. You can have the child entity association lazily loaded, which is the best default because EAGER fetching is bad for performance.
2. When you need to fetch the child entities, you either need to navigate the association as long as the Persistence Context is open, or run a JPQL query if the parent entity is detached:

that makes sense about the PK.

Thanks for the explanation!