Avoid N+1 with DTO mapping on Hibernate entities - spring

Question

In our Restful application we decided to use DTO's to shield the Hibernate domain model for several reasons.
We map Hibernate entities to DTO and vice versa manually using DTOMappers in the Service Layer.
Example in Service Layer:
#Transactional(readOnly=true)
public PersonDTO findPersonWithInvoicesById(Long id) {
Person person = personRepository.findById(id);
return PersonMapperDTOFactory.getInstance().toDTO(person);
}
The main concept could be explained like this:
JSON (Jackson parser) <-> Controller <-> Service Layer (uses Mapping Layer) <-> Repository
We agreed that we retrieve associations by performing a HQL (or Criteria) using a left join.
This is mostly a performant way to retrieve relations and avoids the N+1 select issue.
However, it's still possible to have the N+1 select issue when a developer mistakenly forgets to do a left join. The relations will still be fetched because the PersonDTOMapper will iterate over the Invoices of a Person for converting to InvoiceDTOs. So the data is still fetched because the DTOMapper is executed where a Hibernate Session is active (managed by Spring)
Is there some way to make the Hibernate Session 'not active' in our DTOMappers? We would face a LazyInitializationException that should trigger the developer that he didn't fetch some data like it should.
I've read about #Transactional(propagation = Propagation.NOT_SUPPORTED) that suspends the transaction. However, I don't know that it was intended for such purposes.
What is a clean solution to achieve this? Alternatives are also very welcome!

Answer 1

Usually I use the mapper in the controller layer. From my prspective, the service layer manages the application business logic, dtos are very useful if you want to rapresent data to the external world in a different way. In this way you may get the lazy inizitalization excpetion you are looking for.
I have one more reason to prefer this solution: just image you need to invoke a public method inside a public method in the service class: in this case you might need to call the mapper several times.

Answer 2

If you are using Hibernate, then there are specific ways that you can determine if an associated object has been lazy-loaded.
For example, let's say you have an entity class Foo that contains a #ManyToOne 'foreign' association to entity class Bar which is represented by a field in Foo called bar.
In you DTO mapping code you can check if the associated bar has been lazy-loaded using the following code:
if (!(bar instanceof HibernateProxy) ||
!((HibernateProxy)bar).getHibernateLazyInitializer().isUninitialized()) {
// bar has already been lazy-loaded, so we can
// recursively load a BarDTO for the associated Bar object
}

Answer 3

The simplest solution to achieve what you desire is to clear the entity manager after querying and before invoking the DTO mapper. That way, the object will be detached and access to uninitialized assocations will trigger a LazyInitializationException instead.
I felt your pain as well which drove me to developing Blaze-Persistence Entity Views which allows you to define DTOs as interfaces and map to the entity model, using the attribute name as default mapping, which allows very simple looking mappings.
Here a little example
#Entity
class Person {
#Id Long id;
String name;
String lastName;
String address;
String city;
String zipCode;
}
#EntityView(Person.class)
interface PersonDTO {
#IdMapping Long getId();
String getName();
}
Querying would be as simple as
#Transactional(readOnly=true)
public PersonDTO findPersonWithInvoicesById(Long id) {
return personRepository.findById(id);
}
interface PersonRepository extends EntityViewRepository<PersonDTO, Long> {
PersonDTO findById(Long id);
}
Since you seem to be using Spring data, you will enjoy the spring data integration.