Hi guys,

I was debugging some code and noticed that calling session.get() returns a proxy if the proxy exists in the persistence context. This came as a bit of a surprise, especially after reading HiA (that's addressed here http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=941435).

While trying to understand what was going on, I traced through the Hibernate code and found that a database hit was actually incurred, and the loaded entity set to the implementation field of the lazy initializer of the proxy.

So here's what I can't figure out. If the database hit is incurred anyway, and if the object is loaded, why doesn't get() immediately return the entity instead of a proxy to it? Is there any reason not to?

Thanks,
mers



Hibernate version:
3.2.6

Code:
sessionFactory.getCurrentSession().load(Car.class, 1);
sessionFactory.getCurrentSession().get(Car.class, 1);

My theory is that this behavior is due to that in the scope of a session Hibernate guarantees that a given entity in the database is always represented by the same object. So, if a proxy already exists in the session, then this proxy must always be returned in all methods otherwise you will have two different objects representing the same entity.

The database is probably hit because the proxy hasn't been initialized and Hibernate need to check that it actually exists in the database, since it has to return null if it don't.

Here is some more information about object identity:
http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/re ... s-identity