Hibernate w/ transient objects

Am I missing something with Hibernate, or is it pretty darn hard to mix the following:

• Session-per-request processing (the approach provided by the tapestry-hibernate module)
• Transient objects (a wizard where a complex object is "built" across multiple request/response cycles)
• Persistent objects (the transient keeps references to some persistent objects)

Hibernate seems to make it a bit tricky for me here. I get a lot of odd exceptions, because the new object has references and collections that ultimately point to persistent objects that are detached (their session is long gone).

I'm having to write a lot of code to reattach dependencies, just before I render the page (which traverses the transient object, eventually hitting persistent objects) and before persisting the transient object.

I'm having to iterate over various collections and a few fields and lock the object, to convert it back to a persistent object from a transient one:

    public static void reattach(Session session, Object transientObject) {
        if (transientObject != null) {
            session.buildLockRequest(LockOptions.NONE).lock(transientObject);
        }
    }

    public static void reattach(Session session, Object transientObject) {
        if (transientObject != null) {
            session.buildLockRequest(LockOptions.NONE).lock(transientObject);
        }
    }

In other cases, where the transient object has a reference to an object that may already be present in the Session, I must use code like:

category = (Session) session.get(Category.class, session.getId());  

If Tapestry supported it, I suppose some of this would go away if we used a long-running Session that persisted between requests. However, that has its own set of problems, such as coordinating the lifecycle of such a session (when is it started? When is it discarded? What about in a cluster?)

My current solution feels kludgey, and not like Idiomatic Java, more like appeasing the API Gods. I'd really like to see this happen more automatically or transparently ... for instance, when persisting a transient instance, there should be a way for Hibernate to "gloss over" these detached objects and just do what I want. Perhaps its there and I'm missing it?

From http://tapestryjava.blogspot.com/2011/03/hibernate-w-transient-objects.html