I use an HQL like this:

From Parent p left join fetch p.children

The issue is that when a parent does not have any children in the database, the collection of children remains uninitialized.

Then I have to loop on the resultant parents and initialize the children collections one by one, which issues unnecessary db requests.

I have searched all through the forum and read a lot in Hibernate in action and the hibernate reference. but I have no clue for this.

Any ideas ?

I use Hibernate 3.02