How to avoid an infinite loop in Hibernate when dialing bidirectional collections?

I am trying to populate some object objects in a very simple Hibernate example. My database consists of two tables: "Departments" (Id, Name) and "Employees" (Id, DepartmentsId, FirstName, LastName). My SQL query is just a left-handed connection of employees with departments.

I created the annotations specified in the Hibernate documentation , but whenever I try to serialize objects, Hibernate goes into an infinite loop and ultimately throws a StackOverFlowError exception. Someone who answered my other question was able to determine that the stack overflow occurs because the Department object contains a set of Employee objects, each of which contains a Department object that contains a set of Employee objects, etc. . and etc.

This type of bidirectional communication should be legal according to the documentation mentioned above (the "mappedBy" parameter in the department should indicate Hibernate, I also tried using the "joinColumn" annotation, which is commented out in the code below) and other things that I read indicate that Hibernate should be smart enough not to go into an infinite loop in this situation, but it does not work for my example. Everything works fine if I change the bidirectional relationship with unidirectional relationships by removing the department object from the Employee class, but obviously this leads to a loss of a lot of functionality.

I also tried to discard the annotations for the old xml mapping files and setting the “reverse” parameter for the child table, but it still causes the same problem. How can I make these bidirectional relationships work the way they should work?

Department:

package com.test.model;

import java.util.HashSet;
import java.util.Set;
import javax.persistence.Column;
import javax.persistence.Entity;
import javax.persistence.FetchType;
import javax.persistence.GeneratedValue;
import javax.persistence.JoinTable;

import static javax.persistence.GenerationType.IDENTITY;
import javax.persistence.Id;
import javax.persistence.OneToMany;
import javax.persistence.Table;
import javax.persistence.JoinColumn;

import org.hibernate.Hibernate;
import org.hibernate.proxy.HibernateProxy;

@Entity
@Table(name="Departments"
,catalog="test"
)
public class Department implements java.io.Serializable {

 private Integer id;
 private String name;
 public Set<Employee> employees = new HashSet<Employee>(0);

public Department() {
}


public Department(String name) {
    this.name = name;
}
public Department(String name, Set employees) {
   this.name = name;
   this.employees = employees;
}

 @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy=IDENTITY)


@Column(name="Id", unique=true, nullable=false)
public Integer getId() {
    return this.id;
}

public void setId(Integer id) {
    this.id = id;
}


@Column(name="Name", nullable=false)
public String getName() {
    return this.name;
}

public void setName(String name) {
    this.name = name;
}

@OneToMany(fetch=FetchType.LAZY, mappedBy="department")
/*@OneToMany
@JoinColumn(name="DepartmentsId")*/
public Set<Employee> getEmployees() {
    return this.employees;
}

public void setEmployees(Set employees) {
    this.employees = employees;
}
}

Employee:

package com.test.model;

import javax.persistence.Column;
import javax.persistence.Entity;
import javax.persistence.FetchType;
import javax.persistence.GeneratedValue;
import javax.persistence.JoinTable;

import static javax.persistence.GenerationType.IDENTITY;
import javax.persistence.Id;
import javax.persistence.JoinColumn;
import javax.persistence.ManyToOne;
import javax.persistence.Table;

@Entity
@Table(name="Employees"
,catalog="test"
)
public class Employee  implements java.io.Serializable {


 private Integer id;
 private Department department;
 private String firstName;
 private String lastName;

public Employee() {
}

public Employee(Department department, String firstName, String lastName) {
   this.department = department;
   this.firstName = firstName;
   this.lastName = lastName;
}

 @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy=IDENTITY)


@Column(name="Id", unique=true, nullable=false)
public Integer getId() {
    return this.id;
}

public void setId(Integer id) {
    this.id = id;
}

@ManyToOne
@JoinColumn(name="DepartmentsId", nullable=false, insertable=false, updatable=false)
public Department getDepartment() {
    return this.department;
}

public void setDepartment(Department department) {
    this.department = department;
}


@Column(name="FirstName", nullable=false)
public String getFirstName() {
    return this.firstName;
}

public void setFirstName(String firstName) {
    this.firstName = firstName;
}


@Column(name="LastName", nullable=false)
public String getLastName() {
    return this.lastName;
}

public void setLastName(String lastName) {
    this.lastName = lastName;
}
}

Department Manager (contains an HQL query):

package com.test.controller;

import java.util.Collections;
import java.util.List;

import java.util.Iterator;

import org.hibernate.Criteria;
import org.hibernate.Hibernate;
import org.hibernate.HibernateException;
import org.hibernate.Query;
import org.hibernate.Session;

import com.test.model.Department;
import com.test.util.HibernateUtil;

public class DepartmentManager extends HibernateUtil {
public List<Department> list() {
    Session session = HibernateUtil.getSessionFactory().getCurrentSession();
    session.beginTransaction();
    List<Department> set = null;
    try {
        Query q = session.createQuery("FROM Department d JOIN FETCH d.employees e");
        q.setResultTransformer(Criteria.DISTINCT_ROOT_ENTITY);
        set = (List<Department>) q.list();
    } catch (HibernateException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        session.getTransaction().rollback();
    }
    session.getTransaction().commit();
    return set;
}
}