How to change hibernate mapping properties at runtime

Question

I have an entity in which i have specified lazy="false" and batch-size="100". It is working fine but in some other scenario i want to remove batch -size and set lazy="true". If i change hbm files then it affect other applications. Is there any way i can change properties of entity for current session only before executing hql.

Answer 1

You can change the fetching strategy (lazy or not) at runtime by HQL or criteria query. In HQL your can use fetch join to initialize values of a joined collection, example:

from Cat as cat
inner join fetch cat.mate
left join fetch cat.kittens

See Hibernate Doku - 15.3. Associations and joins

Use Criteria.setFetchMode(..) of criteria api instead for criteria queries, example:

List cats = sess.createCriteria(Cat.class)
.add( Restrictions.like("name", "Fritz%") )
.setFetchMode("mate", FetchMode.EAGER)
.setFetchMode("kittens", FetchMode.EAGER)
.list();

Hibernate Doku for this: 16.5. Dynamic association fetching