How do you deal with serialized Hits? You raise a "LazyInitializationException" like when a user access an unavailable document? Same for the serializable HitIterator? Which approach are you following to expose the data? christian's proposal? In christian's proposal, what is really needed for serialization is Hit, but then Hit is not thing but a Document and a score wich can be projected as well. I don't see the need for a lazy Hit in this scheme, hence no need for a serializable version. BTW who is consuming Hit(s) aside for the user's application? does Lucene has (public) APIs consuming Hits? Emmanuel On 7 juin 07, at 22:47, John Griffin wrote: