Here's my situation.

I have a bunch of persisted objects. When flushDirty() is called on any of them, I do some work (e.g. send an email), but only if a certain value is set to true for the current transaction. I decided to store that value in an object that I persist with Hibernate. In the flushDirty(), query for the object and do a criteria.list().

The problem is that this triggers the whole flushDirty process again (to maintain consistency before the criteria.list), and the code goes into an infinite loop. Is there some way that I can get around this and do a query from a flushDirty?

Use another session

If I use another session, I won't get any changes that have been made during the current transaction.

1) Start transaction
2) Set the "do some work" flag in the transaction local object to true.
3) Modify some objects
4) Commit transaction

The transaction local has not been stored in the database yet when the flushDirty() is called on the modified objects because changes to the transaction local are part of the transaction, whether its a new session or night (right?). Setting the transaction local cannot be performed before the start of the transaction for obvious reasons.

Is there a way that I can open a new session (still using my handy Hibernate MBean) but keep it from being linked to the container managed transaction? If I can't, I don't see how using another session is going to help me.

you can use the same connection for 2 sessions. Be careful however