I thought of a simpler way to specify what parts of a class that should be loaded, or actually, which set/bag/.. (Collection type) properties that should be initialized.

Eg, I thought of something like this. If you have

class Owner {
Set cats;
Set friends;
Set hobbies;
}

then

Session.load(Owner.class, id, "cats", "friends")

would load the Owner with it's set of Cats and Friends but not it's set of Hobbies.

What about it? *I* think it would be nice, but others may have other feelings...discussion welcome.

- Mikael

you could just make your own method that will load that object and use Hibernate.initialize()

Sure, but I was suggesting that this might me somehing that could be interesting to implement in Hibernate itself. I was interested in if others liked the feature - sure, I could extend the Session class myself and use it locally, but that would not benefit others.

- Mikael

FWIW, this functionality is already available in the Criteria API.