I'm unable to get the following query to work from within Hibernate:

I've tried a variety of approaches, including:

Which produces a
[java] java.lang.NullPointerException
Complaining:
[java] org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: The column name dsrc_id0_ not found.
Yes, dsrc_id is part of the primary key for item.

So it seems that, quite naturally, hibernate wants to create the item object (or at least its id) when using an {item} reference in a query.

I noticed, however, that hibernate does support querys like:

And am wondering if there is a way to get similar support with direct sql without dropping down to jdbc.

No, there is no way besides using plain old JDBC.

Meanwhile, I found a strange, hackish way. Basically I define a "mapping" to a java.lang.String type from a non-existent table. The mapping declares a string (the string) as the id. Basically, that does the trick. Doesn't save much over JDBC and of course needless to have Hibernate involved, etc, but it does work.