I do have the same problem, need to iterate through the whole collection to make object available outside the persistence context. I am passing persistent object to web layer. With hibernate, according to the api, you can use Hibernate.initialize() to initialize your Collection. There doesn't seem to be anything planned in jpa for such task. Anyone knows ? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4017755#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...