hibernate lazy initialization and jason response to an ajax call

Some days back I was coding and found an interesting problem. It is as follows.

I have two classes called Lecturer and Course. My Lecturer class has a List of Course objects a variable as shown

@OneToMany(mappedBy = "lecturer")

@NotFound(action = NotFoundAction.IGNORE)

private List<Course> courseList = new ArrayList<Course>();

In my course class I have a Lecturer object as a variable as below.

@ManyToOne@JoinTable(name = "course_lecturer", joinColumns = @JoinColumn(name = "course_id"), inverseJoinColumns = @JoinColumn(name = "lecturer_id"))

private Lecturer lecturer;

Now I have a spring Controller method that returns a json object of Lecturer as below.

@RequestMapping(value = "/getlecturerbyid", method = RequestMethod.POST)

public @ResponseBodyObject getLecturer(@ModelAttribute(value = "id") Lecturer lecturer) {

Map<String, Object> response = new HashMap<String, Object>();

    response.put("message", "succeess");

    response.put("lecturer", lecturer);return response;

}

The problem is it throws a lazy initialization exception. Therefore I set fetch type in both variables in Lecturer and Course class to eager. Now the problem is it infinitely tries to fetch objects eagerly(if I unset fetch of either, it raises the same exception).On the other hand if I remove the 

variable of either class, then the hibernate does not know that there is a relationship for another. eg: if I remove course list from Lecturer and delete one of the Lecturer objects then hibernate does not remove the course objects that are related with the deleted Lecturer object. so i have to write a hibernate query and remove it manually in the code.

A solution to the above problem is to iterate the list of courses and set the Lecturer as null before putting it into response to break the circular relationship as below:

Object getLecturer(@ModelAttribute(value = "id") Lecturer lecturer) {

Map<String, Object> response = new HashMap<String, Object>();

     response.put("message", "succeess");

          //break the circular relationship

          if(lecturer.getCourses() != null) {

             for(Course course: lecturer.getCourses()){

              course.setLecturer(null);

           }

   }

    response.put("lecturer", lecturer);

    return response;

}