Hibernate Objects in HTTP Sessions

While discussing common problems and pitfalls in web development we stumbled on the pitfall of storing hibernate objects in a HTTP session. I do not recommend doing this mainly because of the common pitfall with detached objects.
Usually the lifecycle of a hibernate session is attached to a request/response. So after the end of the response the hibernate object is detached. Accessing non loaded associations of detached objects causes a LazyInitializationException. Even if you try to update or save the detached object you will get an exception if the object isn’t in the hibernate session already. You could re-attach/merge the detached object but this writes your changes on the detached object to the database.
A better way would be to store only the identifier of the hibernate object in the HTTP session,
so you can load the object from the database when you need it.

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