title: Why doesn't JPA offer a loadChildren() method for lazily loaded relations?
body: <p>There are times when I want to define a relationship as being lazily loaded, since 90% of the time I don't want the child entities, yet also have the possibility of getting the whole hierarchy at once, under certain circumstances. I don't want to achieve this by using a named query, since the parent-child hierarchy is useful when I convert to e.g. JSON format. At the moment my dirty hack is to call .getChildEntities().size() to force the lazy load within the same transaction.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a better way?</p>