I'm trying to use webservices with lazy loaded collections. This works fine except for the fact that the lazy collections get loaded when serializing the object. I don't want the collection initialized immediately, but only by calling a webmethod that reattaches the object and initializes the collection.
I guess this happens because when serializing the object, the collection property is accessed. Is there a work-around? Do I have to check whether the collections is already initialized and if not, not serialize it?

Example of mapping file:

Does your webmethod define whether or not the actual collection is returned?

If so, I'd decouple the reference a bit more. When serializing, if you don't even need the collection, the property will be scanned of course. You can decorate the collection with an attribute that says not to serialize, but this will affect the case when you DO want the collection.

In this case, you'd have 2 webmethods, one that fetches the root object, and one that fetches the root object AND the associated collection. You'd remove the property and define a query that returns the same list.

HTH.

In the case that you want the lazy collection serialized, this may help you.

http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=961354

In the case that you don't want it serialized, what I've been doing is just nulling out the collection (or whatever other properties that I don't want being serialized) before returning from the web method.

I tried using the XMLIgnore tag and this works fine when serializing the object. But then when I call a webmethod to get the collection the object gets deserialized with the collection = nothing. Nhibernate then apparently thinks the collection is already initialized, so it doesn't retrieve the data when I ask for it.

This is why you null the collection out when you don't want it serialized. If you use XMLIgnore, it will never serialize the collection, even when you want it to.

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