I've unsuccessfully tried getting help on this topic before. I really would like to understand what going on with the problem i'm having.

I have a class with a collection property. When the class instance becomes persistant and the collection property is being set, I need to iterate via the collection in order to compute some totals and to index the collection entries by their type into a hashmap. I also need to decorate the collection with an ObservableCollection (using commons-events observable collections).

The problem is that if I try to iterate via this collection when its setter being called by Hibernate I keep getting a " illegal access to loading collection" exception.

I've looked over all documentation and search many times through forum archives but found no explaination on how this works. When exactly a collection becomes available for iterating? Can any answer this question for me? Is there some document I missed?

I'm not using lazy loading, all persistant objects are set to lazy="false" and all collections to fetch="join"

If you need more info about my setup, please see this post: http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=950439&

Thansk
Dmitry

Hibernate version:
3.0.5

As I understand it, the earliest you should modify a loaded object is during its PostLoadEvent. However I don't think that there are any rules about the order in which objects are loaded: just because your nesting class is loaded doesn't mean that all its nested objects are loaded, even when you use fetch="join" lazy="false".

You could put a PostLoadEventListener on the nested class, and decorate each item in the collection as it's being loaded. For the totals/hashmap part, without knowing the internal of the system the best I can suggest is to calculate them when first accessed, instead of on loading. This may also have minor performance benefits if you sometimes don't access those values.