anyone have ideas on what a good way to tell my service layer what data to initialize from objects it returns?

im not using the open-session-in-view pattern here.

for example my UserService.getUser(Long id)

say User has a Roles List, (list of Role objects) how should I tell my UserService.getUser() method what collections to load?

I dont want to have methods like getUserWithRoles()

another issue is like what if a Role object has a lazy Groups collection, how could I load all the Groups in the Roles? do I really need to iterate thru roles and use Hibernate.initialize on role.getGroups?

is there a way to load several collections at once in one query?

like in my previous example:

User.getRoles(): list of Role objects
Role.getGroups(): list of Group objects

can i load that in one hql query?

No, its not currently possible to load multiple collections at once. It is, however, possible to load tuples of the associated objects in a single select.

gavin could you provide an example how I would get data using a tuples?

currently the best i've done in getting multiple collections initialized is:

User user = (User) baseService.load(User.class, 1, new String[]{"getRoles","getGallerys","getImages"});

returns a list of Object[3]