How to solve the “failed to lazily initialize a collection of role” Hibernate exception

If you know that you'll want to see all Comments every time you retrieve a Topic then change your field mapping for comments to:

@OneToMany(fetch = FetchType.EAGER, mappedBy = "topic", cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
private Collection<Comment> comments = new LinkedHashSet<Comment>();

Collections are lazy-loaded by default, take a look at this if you want to know more.

From my experience, I have the following methods to solved the famous LazyInitializationException:

(1) Use Hibernate.initialize

Hibernate.initialize(topics.getComments());

(2) Use JOIN FETCH

You can use the JOIN FETCH syntax in your JPQL to explicitly fetch the child collection out. This is some how like EAGER fetching.

(3) Use OpenSessionInViewFilter

LazyInitializationException often occur in view layer. If you use Spring framework, you can use OpenSessionInViewFilter. However, I do not suggest you to do so. It may leads to performance issue if not use correctly.