I'm no expert, but this makes sense to me. I'm planning on doing something similar in my application when selecting sets objects with a deep object graph for display (and selection). Purists will no doubt howl, but I plan, in some cases, to create views to generate search results. A 'flat proxy POJO' (I don't know what else to call it) would be defined for each view. And from that proxy object, I'll get the id of the object the user is actually interested in, and go fetch it. I haven't benchmarked any of this yet, but I expect the application would do much less work. Plus, I get more control over the SQL actually executed during the search. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4056685#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...