Hi
I'm trying to override the lazy fetch mode (declared in the mapping xml file) by using the Criteria API and setFetchMode(FetchMode.EAGER). However, it seems that the collections of the objects i obtain aren't initialize. Is that normal ? Can someone help me ?

I'm having the same problem with Criteria API and hibernate 2.1.8:

List allInfo = session.createCriteria(ProductInfo.class) .setFetchMode("orderDetails", FetchMode.EAGER) .createCriteria("orderDetails", "orderDetails") .createAlias("orderType", "orderType") .createAlias("prices", "prices") .add(Expression.eq("orderType.name", orderType) .setResultTransformer(Criteria.DISTINCT_ROOT_ENTITY).list();

The order details for the product are not initialized after executing this even though the sql statement retrieved all the data from the database. The line:
setFetchMode("orderDetails", FetchMode.EAGER) doesn't seem to override the lazy default setting for the association.

Setting the mapping of the association to EAGER does work, the second association is then, though set to EAGER as well, not being initialized for the following reason (taken from 'Hibernate in Action''):

Hibernate currently limits you to fetching just one collection eagerly. This is a reasonable restriction, since fetching more than one collection in a single
query would be a Cartesian product result. This restriction might be relaxed
in a future version of Hibernate, but we encourage you to think about the
size of the result set if more than one collection is fetched in an outer join.

So if you have problems with setting EAGER modes at runtime it's most probably because of this restriction or because of the following, already known and unfortunatelly still open issue:

http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HB-763

I still have the problem that i'd like to set the mapping for all the associations in the mapping files to lazy='true' and to deside each time when i run queries whether i' like to load and initialize all, some or none of the associated collections. I don't want to set outer-join property to "true", but lazy to "false" programmatically.

I still haven't found what i was looking for ....

Did you try to set the max fetch depth property in hibernate.properties.
In your case a value of 2 must do the trick.
my assumption:
Yours is a Product -> Order -> OrderDetails relnship..