Hi,

Say, for example, I have a State object. This State object has the following properties:

id - the unique id
shortName - the short name such as "WY"
longName - the long name such as "Wyoming".

Now say I have a Person object, which using a many to many association has a method getStatesVisited() that returns a Collection of State objects.

If I want to create a Person from an html form that gives me these State ids, wouldn't I have to load all the State objects from the database before I could create the Person?

Certainly, in this caseI could keep all the State objects in memory in a Singleton, for example, to make them easier to access but I was wondering if there were another hibernate pattern that made it easier to create/update objects when just given the Collection objects' ids rather than the objects themselves.

Thanks,
Gabe

You have to load the objects all by id. The simplest solution would be to just use a second-level cache for the State Objects. This would spare you the database hits and would be very easy to implement, because the state data will most likely never change. A read-only cache would be sufficient.

You can also proxy state, so loading them, won't load it until your really access non id properties. Thus only linking person to state won't load state

Ah yes, I allways forget about that one - thats really a cool feature.