How to solve the “failed to lazily initialize a collection of role” Hibernate exception

If you know that you'll want to see all Comments every time you retrieve a Topic then change your field mapping for comments to:

@OneToMany(fetch = FetchType.EAGER, mappedBy = "topic", cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
private Collection<Comment> comments = new LinkedHashSet<Comment>();

Collections are lazy-loaded by default, take a look at this if you want to know more.

From my experience, I have the following methods to solved the famous LazyInitializationException:

(1) Use Hibernate.initialize

Hibernate.initialize(topics.getComments());

(2) Use JOIN FETCH

You can use the JOIN FETCH syntax in your JPQL to explicitly fetch the child collection out. This is some how like EAGER fetching.

(3) Use OpenSessionInViewFilter

LazyInitializationException often occur in view layer. If you use Spring framework, you can use OpenSessionInViewFilter. However, I do not suggest you to do so. It may leads to performance issue if not use correctly.

I know it's an old question but I want to help. You can put the transactional annotation on the service method you need, in this case findTopicByID(id) should have

@Transactional(propagation=Propagation.REQUIRED, readOnly=true, noRollbackFor=Exception.class)

more info about this annotation can be found here

About the other solutions:

fetch = FetchType.EAGER 

is not a good practice, it should be used ONLY if necessary.

Hibernate.initialize(topics.getComments());

The hibernate initializer binds your classes to the hibernate technology. If you are aiming to be flexible is not a good way to go.

Hope it helps