We have a line drawn in the sand between our GUI code and our database access code. All calls from the GUI must go through an interface to retreive data so we never tightly couple the code. i.e. we could easily swap out the GUI for a text-only version of our app using the same interface. For example we might have GUI code like:

IDataManager manager = DataManagerFactory.createManager();
List<FooUser> list = manager.getUsers();

For (FooUser user : list) {
panel.add(new Label(user.getName());
}

// above code adds all the usernames as labels to a GUI panel

Inside the getUsers function of the DataManager implementation of IDataManger would be the hibernate code to open a session, select all the users from the database, and close the session.

This separation is great for code re-use but I run into problems with no-active hibernate session when trying to access fields in the POJO on the GUI side. The solution is to load all the fields before returning the POJO or have more methods in the interface to load the extra fields as needed.

But often I'll find myself passing in a POJO and calling session.get to load the object I already loaded! Does anyone else use this line-in-the-sand approach and have better ways?

Are the properties on the POJO other objects persisted by Hibernate? If so, set lazy="false" on the property assignments in the XML for the O/RM.

Sure, but I still end up having to re-load the POJO. For example, I get the entire object with lazy false, the GUI updates some of the fields. I want to call session.update on that object but I can't. I'd get a no active session error if I did. I have to call session.get first and "waste" an extra DB lookup.