How to convert a Hibernate proxy to a real entity object

During a Hibernate Session, I am loading some objects and some of them are loaded as proxies due to lazy loading. It's all OK and I don't want to turn lazy loading off.

But later I need to send some of the objects (actually one object) to the GWT client via RPC. And it happens that this concrete object is a proxy. So I need to turn it into a real object. I can't find a method like "materialize" in Hibernate.

How can I turn some of the objects from proxies to reals knowing their class and ID?

At the moment the only solution I see is to evict that object from Hibernate's cache and reload it, but it is really bad for many reasons.

Solution 1:

Here's a method I'm using.

public static <T> T initializeAndUnproxy(T entity) {
    if (entity == null) {
        throw new 
           NullPointerException("Entity passed for initialization is null");
    }

    Hibernate.initialize(entity);
    if (entity instanceof HibernateProxy) {
        entity = (T) ((HibernateProxy) entity).getHibernateLazyInitializer()
                .getImplementation();
    }
    return entity;
}

Solution 2:

Since Hibernate ORM 5.2.10, you can do it likee this:

Object unproxiedEntity = Hibernate.unproxy(proxy);

Before Hibernate 5.2.10. the simplest way to do that was to use the unproxy method offered by Hibernate internal PersistenceContext implementation:

Object unproxiedEntity = ((SessionImplementor) session)
                         .getPersistenceContext()
                         .unproxy(proxy);