Elements Type lost when deserializing a collection in Flex

Question

I am running FlexBuilder, BlazeDS, SBI (Spring Blaze Integration), Hibernate with Tomcat 6 on a local machine.
I have a layoutStructure object that holds layoutModule objects in its layoutStructure.children ArrayCollection. On the server LayoutStructure.java contains a List<LayoutModule> children collection annotated OneToMany to the LayoutModule table. I can see in the BlazeDS debugger that the List<LayoutModule> being sent from the server correctly contains LayoutModule objects but when it is being deserialized in Flex all of them lose their type and are translated into Object type.
Can anyone please let me know why do you thing that is? I have all the [RemoteClass(alias=" ... ")] mappings correctly done. Here is some of the code (omitting all the packaging information):
LayoutStructure.java:
@Entity
@Table (name="layoutstructure")
public class LayoutStructure implements Serializable
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 8935662122890799233L;
    @Id 
    @GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.AUTO)
    @Column(name="layoutStructureId")
    public Integer id ;
    @OneToOne(
        cascade=CascadeType.ALL,
        optional=false)
    public User user;
    @OneToMany(
        fetch = FetchType.EAGER,
        cascade = CascadeType.ALL )
    @JoinColumn(
        name = "fk_layoutId",
        nullable = false )
    @org.hibernate.annotations.IndexColumn(
        name = "position")
    public List<LayoutModule> children ;
LayoutModule.java:
@Entity
@Table (name = "layout_module")
public class LayoutModule implements Serializable
    private static final long serialVersionUID = -4413201380054375907L;
     * NanToNullProxy() needed in order to null out the id:Number
     * property coming from Flex in a newly created object (it
     * defaults to NaN in Flex but I need it NULL for Hibernate
     * to persist it as a new object).
    public LayoutModule(){
        BeanProxy bp = new NanToNullProxy();
        bp.setIncludeReadOnly(true);
        PropertyProxyRegistry.getRegistry().register(LayoutModule.class, bp);
    private Integer id;
    @Id @GeneratedValue( strategy=GenerationType.AUTO )
    public Integer getId() {
        return id;
    public void setId(Integer id) {
        this.id = id;
LayoutModule.as:
    [Bindable]
    [RemoteClass(alias="test.layout.LayoutModule")]
    public class LayoutModule extends EventDispatcher implements IUID
         * The id number to store in the database.
        public var id : Number ;
         * Unique Id needed for proper identification
         * in the tree component when it is being
         * reopened to the same LayoutUnit after refreshing
         * the dataProvider.
        public function get uid():String
            return String(id) + "c";
        public function set uid( uid:String ):void
Any help would be greatly apprectiated. Thanks. Dahn.

Answer 1

Hi DJ
Thanks for the quick reply.
The good news is that what you suggest simplifies my process a lot. So thanks for that.
The bad news in the order in still wrong. I.E it's not as the collection order, but it is the same order as the Process Multiple file route!
So a step forward, but not quite there yet.
Thanks so far!
Chris