Get object by ID in Hibernate

Question

I noticed that our senior developer uses following code for retrieving entity by ID:

@Override
public Source get(Long id) {
    Session session = getSession();
    if( session == null )
        session = sessionFactory.openSession();
    final Source source = (Source)session.load(Source.class, id);
    Hibernate.initialize(source);
    return source;
}

What is benefit of this code?

Why not simply writing

return (Soruce) getSession().get(Source.class, id);

Answer 1

Those 2 pieces of code aren't equivalent.

session.load(Source.class, id);

will throw an exception if there is no Source entity with the identifier id.

getSession().get(Source.class, id);

will return null if there is no Source entity with the identifier id.