Spring Data JPARepository: How to conditionally fetch children entites

Question

How can one configure their JPA Entities to not fetch related entities unless a certain execution parameter is provided.

According to Spring\'s documentation, 4.3.9

Answer 1

Spring data does not ignore fetch=FetchType.Lazy.

My problem was that I was using dozer-mapping to covert my entities to graphs. Evidently dozer calls the getters and setters to map two objects, so I needed to add a custom field mapper configuration to ignore PersistentCollections...

GlobalCustomFieldMapper.java:

public class GlobalCustomFieldMapper implements CustomFieldMapper 
{
    public boolean mapField(Object source, Object destination, Object sourceFieldValue, ClassMap classMap, FieldMap fieldMapping) 
    {
       if (!(sourceFieldValue instanceof PersistentCollection)) {
            // Allow dozer to map as normal
            return;
        }
        if (((PersistentCollectiosourceFieldValue).wasInitialized()) {
            // Allow dozer to map as normal
            return false;
        }

        // Set destination to null, and tell dozer that the field is mapped
        destination = null;
        return true;
    }   
}