I have a domain class A that contain a list of String.

I want to retrieve all A instances that have a String equals to "example" in it's
collection. I don't need to initialize String collection.

How can i do ?

You could be a little bit more precise.
That mights help :
http://www.hibernate.org/118.html#A12

thank you. But i'd like to do this using hql or criterias.
My db doesn't support subquery.

My domain class is like

class A {
private Long id;
private List labelList; // list of String

// getters and setters
// ......
}

I want to retrieve all A instance that has "coucou" in its labelList.

select a from A as a where 'example' in elements (a.labelList)