How to solve the “failed to lazily initialize a collection of role” Hibernate exception

If you know that you’ll want to see all Comments every time you retrieve a Topic then change your field mapping for comments to:

@OneToMany(fetch = FetchType.EAGER, mappedBy = "topic", cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
private Collection<Comment> comments = new LinkedHashSet<Comment>();

Collections are lazy-loaded by default, take a look at this if you want to know more.