Hello All, I want to load an object (say parent) from the database. It references another object (say child) (which is also stored in the database in a different table). When I load the parent object, Hibernate automatically instantiates the child too, which is fantastic.

How would I handle those cases where the child already exists in memory and I don't want hibernate to load the child when I load the parent ?

Thanks for your time, Bhishma

It depends on whether the child is already attached to the Hibernate persistence-context or not.
If the persistence-context knows about the child-object because you retrieved it via hibernate, then you don't have to do anything - hibernate won't load the child-object again and your parent-object will reference the exact child-instance you retrieved before.
If the child-object is in detached state (i.e. not contained in the persistence-context) you won't be able to avois a database-hit. If you reattach the child via saveOrUpdate() hibernate will also have to look up the child-object in the database to see whether it's dirty or not.

Hi

You can use lazy="true" in your child collection . then hibernate load child collection at the time you use it. Use some second level caching.



Amila

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