Essentially I have an object which contains other objects(which could be other containers or a leaf object) and I am using the Composite design pattern and need help using and mapping this with Hibernate.

public abstract class Component{
int id;
String name;
someOperation();
...
}

public class Composite extends Component{
...
List items; //Contains all subComponents
someOperation();
...
}

public class Leaf extends Component{
someOperation();
...
}

How can query on just the parent containers id, and populate the whole structure?

Thanks for any help.

Please read the doc in polymorphism

the wiki has a subject on this:

http://www.hibernate.org/86.html