It looks like I'm experiencing cases here in which calling an association getter on a mapped object in persistent state returns null even though the association exists in the database. This shouldn't happen, right? However, I have the access="field" attribute set in the Hibernate mapping file for all properties and associations (there's just a default-access="field" declaration for the whole file). It seems somewhat logical that these null returns would happen in such a scenario because (I imagine) Hibernate can't intercept field accesses. Can anyone confirm this?

I can't think of any way to intercept field access in Java, can you?

Anyway, hibernate does not need to intercept field access (even if you use access type field), because it does not place null-values instead of associated objects replacing them when you access them via getter. Actually, hibernate places proxies instead, so there will never be a null value if an association exists.

There has to be some other problem with your mapping/code. Maybe we can help, if you post it.