I'm trying to implement long transactions, but since I can't actually reconnect the session after it's disconnected, I keep getting lazy initialize errors when accessing the object attached to a disconected session. What should I be doing now to implement long transactions? Thanks!

http://hibernate.org/42.html
http://hibernate.org/43.html

Hmm... that doesn't really help. I'm using the session-per-request pattern for all of my app except one place where I'd like to use a long transaction. All I want to know is how to reconnect a session, not use an entirely new session handling routine that's not going to work for my use case.

Uhm, beginning a Transaction obtains a new Connection for the Session from the configured ConnectionProvider, so you'd only have to use reconnect() if you supply a custom Connection object. We un-deprecated it for that purpose in the latest 3.1 again, but that's really the only use case.

Oh, well that's the problem then. I don't start a transaction, I just grab a persistent collection from the object attached to the disconnected session.

Check out lines 1233 - 1235 of SessionImpl RC2:

// if ( !jdbcContext.getConnectionManager().isLogicallyConnected() ) {
// reconnect();
// }

I don't really know what you are trying to tell me. If you don't have database transaction you can't have data access.

Well then I must not know how Hibernate handles transactions, but I don't ever start them myself for read-only queries. All I know is that this causes my code to work:

session.reconnect(session.connection());

So you didn't read the two pages I posted earlier?

My last posting in this thread: You are relying on a side-effect of auto-committed JDBC connections. This is exactly what is mentioned in the Hibernate 3.1 migration guide on the website. In other words, you believe that you can access a database "outside of a transaction" if you only read data. This is of course not true and possible.

Alright. Thanks for your help, Christian.