Can somebody teach me an approach to left join fetch and filter the collection being fetched. In my situation, I have 4 Hibernate mapped Java classes, and there is a one-to-many relation that goes down through all of them in a line. Each class is a collection of another class.

What I want to achieve is that when a collection is being fetched, not all the associated objects should be loaded, but only these meet the condition.

For example, There are Country,City,District, and Street 4 classes. A country has a collection of cities, a city has a collection of districts, and a district has a collection of streets. Now I want query Country with conditions being imposed on it's city,district and street, and the city,district,or street will not be fetched if it dosen't meet the condition. If There is not any city, district and street meet the conditions, their country will not be selected, otherwise the country will be selected, but of which maybe not all child cities, districts and streets be selected. This is what I mean filter the collection.

In the new version hibernate reference, I have noticed a keyword 'with'. It seems useful in my case. Can some one provide me some good suggestions.Thanks in advance.

Let me say it in code, maybe it will facilitate you understanding my problem.

The data structure is:
Country --(collection)-->City--(collection)-->District--(collection)-->Street

The query is:
from Country as country
left join fetch country.cities as city
left join fetch city.districts as district
left join fetch district.streets as street
where country.name like 'A%'
and city.name like 'N%'
and district like 'M%'
and street like 'P%'

This query will return a list of Country objects. But there is a problem, when I access the collections, I found out thay are lazy loaded. When Hibernate lazy loads objects ,i.e. cities of a country, it will load all the cities of that country using a sql ,like 'select * from CITY_TABLE where COUNTRY_ID = ?'. And as I have explained, I don't want all the cities to be loaded, but only these that meet the condition , say, city's name with an inital N.

That's my problem. is there any solution or hibernate dose not support this kind of query?