I am using joined-subclass ( table per subclass ) to model my subclasses. I have a use case where I would like to instantiate only the super class without instantiating the subclasses. When I give type as Base.class to criteria, hibernate is doing outer joins to all the sub class tables and is instantiating the appropriate sub classes. Is there a way to only get objects of base class. I see a 'lazy' attribute in the joined-subclass but I don't think that would prevent instantiating sub class.

I think using polymorphism='explicit' would work.

No, it didn't work. When I do a session.load the derived class is being instantiated even when I pass in the base class