I have a List of persisted entities which will grow
very large (perhaps 10000 elements) over time.
Most of the time I will be accessing this List simply
to add another entity using List.add(Object). When
doing this Hibernate loads the entire List (even with
lazy fetching), although strictly speaking you could
persist the added entries just by knowing the size
of the list and adding the new rows to the table.

Is there any way to implement a custom List which
would extend laziness to include cases where
the only operations performed on the List are
additions?

Thanks in advance,
Dan

dlr137,

Here is one idea: make the relationship "bidirectional", so that you can not only add children to a parent, but do something like child.setParent(parent);

In your mapping files, you have to create a one-to-many relationship from parent to child, and on the child mapping, a many-to-one relationship from child to parent. Mark the parent-to-child with inverse="true".

In this way, you can add a relationship between the two without having to retrieve the whole list of children. You just create a new children and set his parent.

Gonzao,

Interesting idea. But how then would the table column corresponding
to the list index get set?

Thanks,
Dan

In your mapping file you would already have indicated what your list index column would be.
Other than that, you set it on your bean like you would do with any other property.