I have one complex entity Company and tons of small child entities. Each child entity mapping references parent Company. As result, Company was loading (using join) when I tried to load any child entity.

I have tried to specify outer-join="false" for the child mappings but this did not help - Hibernate continued loading parent Company but with separate select instead of join. (Correct?)

It seems the only way to prevent loading Company every time is setting "proxy" attribute in the company mapping. Is that true?

Unfortunately, after I have modified code to work with proxy, most of the test failed. This is because session.load() always succeeds even for non-existent ID - it returns proxy object where getId() works. The only way to force Hibernate raise exception is session.initialize();

What I need:
1. I need load Company in many places and I need it will be loaded immediately (no proxy).
2. I do not want Company be loaded when I load its child.
3. I do not want loading company with nonexistant ID succeed.

What is the best way to go?

Try using lazy="false" in your mapping to force the object to load.
Alternatively you can do this in your code:

to force that layer of the object mapping to be initialized "immediately" after you have loaded the object.

For 1 & 2, set up Company to use proxy. Then whenever you don't want it to load as part of a relationship, mark that relation using lazy="true" / outer-join="false"...

For 3, the only way is to not load using load. Rather, load using a query based on the id. I think Gavin added support for a new type of load method in one of the CVS versions, but I don't recall the specifics. It was named somthing other than load()

Steve,

To session.load() a lazy object I have used:

session.load( MyClass.class, myKey, LockMode.NONE );

and this seems to load the proxied object immediately.

I have no idea what is happening internally. I am not using any cache.

I did this for code consistency. I specify a lockmode, mosty NONE, for all my loads. This way I can avoid sometimes having to explain in my coding the

session.load();
session.initialize();

situation.

From your point of view, is this acceptable? Are there some internals that may trip me up in future revs?

Evan Vaala

That works also...