I have seen posts all over the internet that talk about how to fix the TransientObjectExceptions during save/update/delete but I am having this problem when calling list on my Criteria.

I have two objects A and B. A has a field named b which is of type B. In my mapping b is mapped as a many-to-one. This all runs in a larger persistence framework (the framework is kind of like Core Data) and so I don't use any cascades in my hibernate mappings since cascades are handled at a higher level.

This is the interesting code surrounding my criteria:

A a = new A();
B b = new B();
a.setB(b);

session.save("B", b); // Actually handled by the higher level
session.save("A", a); // framework, this is just for clarity

// transaction committed and session closed
...
// new session opened

Criteria criteria = session.createCriteria(A.class);
criteria.add(Restrictions.eq("b", b));
List<?> objects = criteria.list();

Basically I am looking for all objects of type A such that A.b equals a particular instance of b (I actually tried restructuring a query so that I was passing in the id of b just to make sure that b wasn't causing me problems).

Here is the stack trace that occurs when I call criteria.list():

org.hibernate.TransientObjectException: object references an unsaved transient instance - save the transient instance before flushing: B
at org.hibernate.engine.ForeignKeys.getEntityIdentifierIfNotUnsaved(ForeignKeys.java:244)
at org.hibernate.type.EntityType.getIdentifier(EntityType.java:449)
at org.hibernate.type.ManyToOneType.nullSafeSet(ManyToOneType.java:141)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.bindPositionalParameters(Loader.java:1769)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.bindParameterValues(Loader.java:1740)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.prepareQueryStatement(Loader.java:1612)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.doQuery(Loader.java:717)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.doQueryAndInitializeNonLazyCollections(Loader.java:270)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.doList(Loader.java:2294)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.listIgnoreQueryCache(Loader.java:2172)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.list(Loader.java:2167)
at org.hibernate.loader.criteria.CriteriaLoader.list(CriteriaLoader.java:119)
at org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl.list(SessionImpl.java:1706)
at org.hibernate.impl.CriteriaImpl.list(CriteriaImpl.java:347)

Here is my mapping:

<class entity-name="A" lazy="false">
<tuplizer entity-mode="dynamic-map" class="MyTuplizer" />
<id type="long" column="id">
<generator class="native" />
</id>
<many-to-one name="b" entity-name="B" column="b_id" lazy="false" />
</class>

<class entity-name="B" lazy="false">
<tuplizer entity-mode="dynamic-map" class="MyTuplizer" />
<id type="long" column="id">
<generator class="native" />
</id>
</class>

Can anyone help me figure out why I would be getting a TransientObjectException during a fetch? Preferably I would like to find a solution that does not rely on cascades since they tend to mask problems that occur in the higher level framework.