[hibernate-dev] Attribute laziness and caching

In reworking some of the support for bytecode-enhanced laziness, I started thinking deeper about this idea of partial caching of such entities. First and foremost, why do we even allow this? Essentially what happens is that we allow a user to partially load an entity, and then stick that partial state into the cache (along with a boolean indicating that the state is partial). I guess I can somewhat see the usefulness of this, but what really gets me confused is how the caching of this data works.. As far as I can tell, we never re-cache the entity state after the uninitialized portions have been initialized. So the cached representation, iiuc, continues to be the partial representation. If we continue to allow the partial representation to be cached, wouldn't we want to update the cache entry with the initialized portions once they become available?