Hi, Everyone!

Well, firstly, thank you for this forum. It's an fine decision, considering that Hibernate is an open-source tool, to answer questions of users who don't even pay for it.

Well, my question is:

Can I define (in a mapping) a property of type Blob in a way that it's lazy instantiatable, instead of creating an entity (a bean) to represent this Blob?

In my problem domain, I'm trying to represent a User-has-many-MessageBox-has-many-Message-has-many-Attachment envronment, in an e-mailing system. Because it's used in a web application, I'd want to get the minimum amount of data per request, to diminish memory using and processing. That means: only when the user access the message x (clicking in a link of a message listing which correspond to the message), and click in the attachment, the attachment data (bytes) would be retrieved from the datasource.

Thanks again.

julioaragao