ManyToOne & lazy initialization

[trashbat]

Hi,

I'm fairly sure this is a simple task, but I can't find much about it, so please bear with me.

I've got an audited entity called Category. When something happens to one of them, on update or persist, I want to create change reports. Therefore I pull the last copy up using AuditReader and compare its properties. For the simple properties, this works fine.

However Category also has a 'parent' property, another Category. getParentCategory() is annotated with @ManyToOne.

When I try to pull this from my Category object, I get a lazy initialization handler, and thus getParentCategory().getWhatever() returns null. I see it has the parent's correct ID in the handler's details, which would be enough for my purposes, but I can't get at that.

I don't want to merge the old object back in, only examine it. I've tried annotating getParentCategory() with:

@ManyToOne(optional = true, fetch=FetchType.EAGER)

but it has no effect.

What can I do?

Cheers,

Rob

[adamw]

Just to make sure, you've got an audited relation, and you call entity.getRelatedEntity().getSomeProperty() and you don't get the expected result?

What is null in your case?

Adam

[trashbat]

Sorry, been away on holiday.

Yes, exactly that. The property is null because getRelatedEntity() returns a proxy.

However I have resolved my problem by calling Hibernate.initialize() on the entity and property. Reading around, this is probably fairly obvious, but I didn't expect it to be lazy in the first place.