Criteria API supports nested eager fetching?

stolley · **Posted:** Tue Feb 24, 2004 10:37 pm

I'm working with HB 2.1.2.

My question/request has to do with setting the fetch-mode when using the criteria API.

It seems like you can't declare eager fetches for nested associations:

Code:

Criteria criteria = session.createCriteria(Person.class);

criteria.createCriteria("entityLocation")
  .add( Expression.eq("id", locationId) )
  .setFetchMode( "entity", FetchMode.EAGER);

From my testing, it seems this will not do an eager fetch for the EntityLocation.entity association (the setFetchMode() doesn't fail, just seems to be ignored).

Am I wrong, or does the criteria API not yet support this?
Any problem with my creating a JIRA to request this functionality?

I can workaround the issue in my app by modelling the EntityLocation.entity association with outer-join="true", but it seems like this is a necessary feature.

nerotnt · **Joined:** Wed Oct 08, 2003 10:31 am **Posts:** 247

stolley wrote:

I'm working with HB 2.1.2.

My question/request has to do with setting the fetch-mode when using the criteria API....

Criteria API doesn't support setting eagger fetching for subcriterias.

stolley · **Posted:** Wed Feb 25, 2004 8:20 pm

Quote:

Criteria API doesn't support setting eager fetching for subcriterias

Sorry, bad example, it doesn't just have to be subcriterias.

When you're displaying the results of a search, it's quite likely that you're going to need attributes from associated objects, whether you restrict on those associations or not. That's why Criteria API eager fetching functionality exists in the first place, right?

The problem is, if your domain model is fine grained, it's inevitable that you'll need to navigate more than one association deep to get the data to display in the result list of your search.

So, I'm not asking specifically for eager fetching of associations off of subcriterias, I'm asking for eager fetching off of any association.

The example code I gave is severely cut down. The actual subcriteria on entityLocation is optional. If that subcriteria is not added, I still need to eager fetch the entityLocation association (which is easy), but I also still need to eager fetch the entity association off of the EntityLocation objects (seems to be impossible?)