Partial Load Alternatives

Question

I have an object model that contains some 1-many mappings. For most of the time our application is interested in loading and displaying top-level objects, so loading our 1-M attributes would be a waste of time. But in some cases I would like to load these owned objects.
Most of my objects are rather large--around 50 or more attributes. So, specifying partial load attributes for these cases would be pretty time consuming, and particularly annoying if our object model ever changed.
Basically, what I want to do is to typically use indirection, but sometimes turn it off for certain queries. Is there a way to do this? Or, on the queries where I want my 1-M objects loaded, should I iterate through my result list and trigger the IndirectLists?
Am I missing some feature of TopLink that handles this?

Answer 1

You should always use indirection.
The 1-m will be instantiated if you access them, there should be no need to instantiate them in your query. If you are doing this because you intend to serialize the objects, then you could iterate over them and instantiate the indirection of what you want to serialize. You may also wish to use batch reading on the 1-m in the query if you know you are going to instantiate them all.