[hibernate-issues] [Hibernate-JIRA] Commented: (HHH-5385) Make Hibernate wrapped objects more serializable friendly

Make Hibernate wrapped objects more serializable friendly --------------------------------------------------------- Key: HHH-5385 URL: http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HHH-5385 Project: Hibernate Core Issue Type: New Feature Reporter: Bill DeCoste Make Hibernate wrapped objects more serializable friendly. LazyInitializationException's are the devil when trying to serialize an object graph. A mechanism for being able to serialize an uninitialized collection or object that returns null or an empty set is highly preferable to the existing behavior that currently causes the infamous LazyInitializationException explosion. - Use case: We'd like to abridge certain object graphs when serializing objects for representation. For instance, I might want to get all Avatar names, but not the entire object graph of every avatar in the system. We currently have a mechanism that accomplishes this, but at substantial cost due to the fact that we must purposefully fetch the entire object, then hack away what we don't want to send. We'd rather leave sub-collections, etc., uninitialized/unfetched and be able to serialize without error. Another way to express it is that we'd like the option to ignore and skip uninitialized collections (leaving them null/empty) when serializing an object. - Related issue: We currently have some code to work around a perceived issue where an empty collection always returns a LazyInitializationException if left in the object graph. We have found that we have to explicitly null-out empty collections in an object before serialization. We'd like to not have to worry about this.