Issues with Lazy Initialization of Hibernate Entities in Java with Spring Boot
I'm dealing with I'm converting an old project and I've been working on this all day and This might be a silly question, but Quick question that's been bugging me - I'm encountering a frustrating issue with lazy initialization of Hibernate entities in my Spring Boot application. I have a `User` entity that has a one-to-many relationship with a `Post` entity. When I try to access the posts of a user outside of the transaction context, I get a `LazyInitializationException`. I'm using Spring Boot 2.5.4 and Hibernate 5.5.3. Here's how my entities are set up: ```java @Entity public class User { @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY) private Long id; private String username; @OneToMany(mappedBy = "user", fetch = FetchType.LAZY) private Set<Post> posts; } @Entity public class Post { @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY) private Long id; private String content; @ManyToOne @JoinColumn(name = "user_id") private User user; } ``` When I retrieve the user like this: ```java User user = userRepository.findById(userId).orElseThrow(); System.out.println(user.getPosts().size()); // Throws LazyInitializationException ``` I’ve found that using `@Transactional` on the service method that retrieves the user resolves the issue, but I’m not sure if this is the best practice. I’ve also tried setting the fetch type to `EAGER`, but that resulted in performance issues due to excessive data loading. Is there a recommended way to handle lazy loading in this context without running into `LazyInitializationException`, while still maintaining performance and following best practices? I've looked into using DTOs and fetch joins but I'm unsure how to correctly implement them in this scenario. Any guidance would be appreciated! This is part of a larger CLI tool I'm building. I'd be grateful for any help. For reference, this is a production application.