I have an object that has a collection which can contain many objects (let's say 30,000 or so). I need the ability to pull one instance by id from the collection for display on the UI. I'd originally thought that using filtered collections might be the way to get that done but Hibernate filters are a bit more course-grained than that.

The contained collection is already lazily loaded which, as I understand it, already creates proxies that contain the ids. Would the normal Hibernate idiom be to find the instance by id from the proxies and simply call another method on the found instance to get Hibernate to load the instance information from the database? If that isn't the way to do it, am I simply missing the "correct" way to do it?

thanks a ton,
phayte

Why can't you just write a specific query to retrieve your object? This way you wouldn't risk loading more objects than you need?

Since I already had a reference to the parent containing object I was hoping there would be a way to walk the object references to get the instance that I needed as opposed to making another call from a DAO.

I was wondering if I mapped the collection as "extra-lazy" and simply looked for the child instance by id if that would get me to where I need. If I iterate over the extra-lazy collection and simply ask for the identifier will that cause the instance's information to be loaded or are they only loaded when you ask for something other than the identifier?

In fact, Hibernate is smart enough to not trigger the select when only requesting the getter corresponding to the mapped it. Obviously take care of never calling another getter/setter inside the "id" one, as it would trigger the corresponding select.