I'm dealing with a legacy Java application with a large, fairly messy codebase. There's a fairly standard 'User' object that gets stored in the HttpSession between requests, so the servlets do stuff like this at the top: HttpSession session = request.getSession(true); User user = (User)session.getAttribute("User"); The old user authentication layer (which I won't describe; suffice to say, it did not use a database) is being replaced with code mapped to the DB with Hibernate. So 'User' is now a Hibernate entity. My understanding of Hibernate object life cycles is a little fuzzy, but it seems like storing 'User' in the HttpSession now becomes a problem, because it will be retrieved in a different transaction during the next request. What is the right thing to be doing here? Can I just use the Hibernate Session object's update() method to reattach the User instance the next time around? Do I need to?