Hibernate version:3


We have pretty much completed mapping a fairly robust set of business objects in our business domain. A good portion of them are working properly with a thin client JSF implementation.

We now are moving to our thick client/Swing support. This object model has been in place along with several think swing clients for a few years.

We move our objects client to server and back by converting to XML (we use Castor, we could use other technology)

When you take an object and serialize/marshall it into XML, you get "copy" of that object on another computer. (sorry for the obvious).

So, the question,problem is this. Server loads an object that has several lazy loads. It sends it to the client, and now the client is looking a a POJO. Hibernate proxies don't exist, since the xml binding tools create the real object.

The client now changes a few items in the object. They don't touch any objects in the any of the lazy loaded collections.

The object is then sent back to the server.

How will a merge handle this? We are merging a pojo object without the proxied collections with the orginal. We do not wish to delete collections, because nothing has changed.

What is the recommended approach to handle this situation? Am i missing some simple answer?

I'm hoping somebody has this same scenario and has worked through it.

much thanks for any help.