Tired of hibernate lazy load errors on collections?

I have a love/hate relationship with Hibernate (Spring w/Hibernate to be fair). It makes some things very, very easy and others so difficult or convoluted.

For example, what should be trivial turns out to be a major pain:

Have an Entity object that contains two child collections. For example

@Entity
public class Client implements Serializable {
...

@OneToMany(mappedBy = "client")
private List users;

@OneToMany(mappedBy = "client")
private List sites;
...

}

Where User and Sites are also simple @Entity classes.

By default the access to these collections are Lazy Loaded. But when you want to access them both you run into problems. Setting both to 'eager' gets an error about too many buckets. Loading one Eager, then passing the object to a JSP for example, with get you the infamous:

org.hibernate.LazyInitializationException: failed to lazily initialize a collection of role: ...Client.organizations, no session or session was closed

(look on Google or StackOverflow for this error, there are no good solutions.)

So the hack/workaround? Create a custom Find method on the DAO and EXPLICITLY tell Hibernate to load the collection.

Note that using the collection directly in 'normal' code doesn't work since Spring/Hibernate/the compiler sees you aren't using the loaded collection and doesn't do the load.

However this works:

Hibernate.initialize(rtn.getOrganizations());

after your default 'find' method returns.

Details of how/why this works here.

Even more bizarre, when debugging this, setting a breakpoint in the 'find' method everything works correctly. No breakpoint and you get the exception.

(Thanks to Scott Mitchell for his help on pointing me to this solution.)