[hibernate-dev] [feature request][discuss] smoother serializers integration?

Hi guys, Short sumarry: Wonder if hibernate could get a feature to kind of either unproxy or freeze the entities once leaving the managed context to avoid uncontrolled lazy loading on one side and serialization issues on another side. Use case example: a common example is a REST service exposing directly hibernate entities (which is more and more common with microservice "movement"). Objective: the goal is to not need any step - or reduce them a lot - between the hibernate interaction and a potential serialization to avoid issues with lazy loading and unexpected loading. Today it requires some custom and hibernate specific logic in the serializer which kind of breaks the transversality of the two concerns (serialization and object management/loading). Implementation options I see: 1. a callback requesting if the lazy relationship should be fetched, something like public interface GraphVisitor { boolean shouldLoad(Object rootEntity, Property property); } 2. An utility to remove any proxy potentially throwing an exception and replacing the value by null or an empty collection, something like MyEntity e = Hibernate.deepUnproxy(entity); 3. A switch of the proxy implementation, this is close to 2 but wouldn't require a call to any utility, just a configuration in the persistence unit. Side note: of course all 3 options can be mixed to create a single solution like having 3 implemented based on 1 for instance. Configuration proposal: this would be activated through a property in the persistence unit (this shouldn't be only global IMHO cause otherwise you can't mix 2 kind of units, like one for JSF and one for JAX-RS to be concrete). This should also be activable as a query hint i think - but more a nice to have. What this feature wouldn't be responsible for: cycles. If relationships are bidirectional then the unproxied entity would still "loop" if you browse the object graph - this responsability would stay in the consumer since it doesn't depend on hibernate directly but more on a plain object handling. What do you think? Romain Manni-Bucau @rmannibucau <https://twitter.com/rmannibucau> | Blog <https://blog-rmannibucau.rhcloud.com> | Old Blog <http://rmannibucau.wordpress.com> | Github <https://github.com/rmannibucau> | LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmannibucau> | JavaEE Factory <https://javaeefactory-rmannibucau.rhcloud.com>