I am reading two things about lazy initialization which seem to conflict.

First, I defined many collection mapping without specifying lazy="false", because I understand that is the default. During run time, I find out I am getting LazyInitializationException when accessing the collection. Then I read you should call Hibernate.initialize(n.getChildren()) to make sure the collection is fetched.

Why didn't lazy default to false to start with? Do I really need to resort to Hibernate.initialize(getChildren()) each time?

ok, must have read an old doc.

hibernate 3 has
Since it is best practice to map almost all classes and collections using lazy="true", that is now the default.

NHibernate 1.0.x defaults to lazy = false while NHibernate 1.2.x defaults to lazy = true.

Symon.