I'm honestly curious here: in this example, how would the software consuming this entity know that Author was NULL b/c this book simply doesn't have any author or that Author is null as a side-effect of it not having been lazy-loaded? Its seems this would be a stumbling block to this approach where null values would need to be explicitly modeled (e.g. using something like the null-object-pattern) in order to avoid this confusion.
Explicitly modeling null (unset) values is often a good idea anyway, but in this case wouldn't you sort of be forced into doing so in order to distinguish the two cases from each other --? Steve Bohlen [email protected] http://blog.unhandled-exceptions.com http://twitter.com/sbohlen On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 7:25 AM, Victor Mingueza <[email protected]>wrote: > In the other two questions the Author is null if you not load it in the > step 1, the session has been closed.
