Hi,

If I have a property of type Set in my persistent class, I would like the getter to return an unmodifiable list, to be sure all changes are done through special convenience methods of adding and removing items. Hibernate in Action suggested using Collections.unmodifiableSet which I thought sounded like a good idea. But then I read that returning a different collection from a getter, than the one Hibernate called with the setter, will cause Hibernate to update the database.

So what should I do then?

Robert

couldn't you just add a POJO method such as pojo.getMySetAsList() which does the logic for you ?
alternatively you could consider setting the property's access to 'field' instead of the default 'property' and wrapping the set in a list using the standard getter:
http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/re ... n-property