How to persist a Hibernate child entity without loading the parent-side Set collection

Question

We are using Hibernate 3.5.6-Final with Hazelcast 3.6.1 2nd level cache.

Situation

I have a bi-directional, one-to-many relation between a Parent

Answer 1

There's a better way:

1. You need to make the many-to-one side lazy.

2. As long as you don't need to fetch the Parent entity in the currently running Persistence Context, you can just fetch a Proxy reference:

   Parent parentProxy = session.load(Parent.class, parentId);
   

3. Now, you can simply create a new child as follows:

   Child newChild = new Child();
   child.setParent(parentProxy);
   session.persist(newChild);
   

Another workaround is as follows:

You don't even fetch a Parent Proxy reference, but instead, you do as follows:

Parent parentReference = new Parent();
parentReference.setId(parentId);

Child newChild = new Child();
child.setParent(parentReference);
session.persist(newChild);

This way, you don't need to fully fetch the Parent entity if all you need is to persist a Child entity.