I have a problem. I need to add an object to a set belonging to a persistent object to take advantage of the cascade="save-update" on it. The set however was not used when the persistent object was in session, so it is just a proxy (non-initialised) and I get a LazyInitializationException, which is natural. I don't want the set to be loaded non-lazily though, and I don't need to know what the set contains. I just want to be able to somehow attach an object to it so that it will automatically be saved. Is there a way to do this?

No. The Set.add() method has a boolean return value and must return true if the item was added and false if the item already existed in the set. To know this the set must be initialized.

I was afraid of that.

Thanks for the reply!