I am migrating a data access layer to hibernate, a few classes at a time. I have had Partition, Meter and StoreMeter working fine for a while, and am now adding MeterChannel. Meter joins one-to-one with StoreMeter and many-to-one with Partition. MeterChannel joins many-to-one with Meter. So when I load a MeterChannel, I am non-lazily, and with fetch="join", loading Meter and Partition. I am lazily loading StoreMeter and that eagerly loads its own Partition object.

Most of the time I load objects via queries, and this is all working fine. In one case I was loading MeterChannels via load (and I've tested it with get, same results) and the last join in the sequence, from Meter to Partition, isn't being fully loaded before the postLoadEventListener is being invoked. I have code in there which checks the data in the Partition object and this is failing. The Partition object has its id loaded but no other values.

Are there any differences between session.get()/session.load() and query.list() in the loading of objects via a chain of many-to-one relationships like this? I'm happed to change my code to use a query which does the same thing as load(), but I'd like to know why this is happening.

I would imagine that there's something easily-explained at work here, but just in case, here's the important bits from the mapping file. The elipses denote extra, unimportant properties that I've removed for brevity.

onPostLoad() is invoked for an entity when the entity itself has been fully initialized. You should not assume that any associated objects you navigate to from the entity will have been fully initialized. They may not be until their own onPostLoad() event occurs.

Not even for non-lazy loading? Is there any way of having some of my code called after an entity and all its eagerly-loaded sub-entities are loaded? Or a way of re-calling onPostLoad after the relevant sub-entities have been loaded?

no