Serializing JPA or Hibernate entities over the wire

In my previous post, we discussed about the need to map properties between Hibernate entities and DTOs. This is required, because Hibernate instuments the byte-code of the Java entity classes using tools such as JavaAssist.

Many developers often encounter the LazyInitializationException of Hibernate when you try to use the Hibernate/JPA entities in your webservices stack. To enable you to serialize the same Hibernate entites across the wire as XML, we have 2 options -

1. Use the entity pruner library - This library essentially removes all the hibernate dependencies from your entity classes by pruning them. Though this library is quite stable, developers should be careful about when to prune and unprune.
2. Use AutoMapper libraries - Using libraries such as Dozer makes it very easy to copy properties from the domain hibernate entity to a DTO class. For e.g.

PersonDTO cleanPerson = mapper.map(person, PersonDTO.class);

Out of the above 2 approaches, I would recommed to use the second one as it is clean and easy to use. It also enforces clean separation of concerns. A good discussion on StackOverFlow is available here.