Is there a way to return a collection of maps rather than a collection of Object arrays in Hibernate when using queries that contain aggregation functions?

For example:

select sum(rc.score) as totalScore from ReportCard rc

As an object array you have to refer to the result by index. But if it were a map, you could refer to it by column name (eg. map.get("totalScore")). This would provide similar to JDBC ResultSet objects. I don't like having to know what column maps to what index and I don't want to create a customized object to encapsulate my results (i.e Select new Result(sum(rc.score))).

So, is it possible to get a collection of maps?

There is an existing JIRA issue for this somewhere.

I proposed the syntax:

select new Map(....) from .....

If you want to try implementing this, that would be cool (should be fairly straightforward with new query parser in HB3).


Note that for the Criteria API, you *can* do this, using the ResultTransformer stuff.