Hibernate version:2.1.6

I have a persistent object with very many dependent objects (Sets mostly). Is there a way I can force an eager load of all the dependent objects? One way it to put it in the mapping file but I dont want to always eager load. Another way is to specify in the hibernate sql all the "outer join fetch" clauses but that is a pain bc there are so many.

I could write something with reflection to find all the Sets, Lists, etc of a POJO and call the getters to force lazy loading. That seems a bit sloppy. Any other thoughts?

sorry but even with a query : only one collection can be fetch... you'll need one fetched query per to-many assocations

example
A--*B
|
|
*
C

you need 2 queries to fetch the entire graph
from A a join fetch a.bs
and
from A a join fetch a.cs

you can see workarounds in hibernate in action, you'll have to choose between efficient lazy loading, eager fetching and smart number of queries

Perhaps you want to look at batch fetching for this.

If you thinkabout it, what you described is a real performance bug, you would end up with a SQL result set with many, many rows (a cartesian product between all collections).