What I mean is that if I don't use Annotations and instead write .hbm.xml files, the EntityMode.DOM4J deserialization is correct : parent collection is crawled, and each child id/property is shown in the resulting XML (following "embed-xml" or "node" mapping attributes).

I agree @Node or @EmbedXml annotations do not exist yet, still I was hoping that the deserialization would work using the "default" hbm.xml node behaviour : that is, if <property name="bar" node="@bar"/> is present it will deserialize as <bean bar="xxx"/>, and if not, it will deserialize as <bean><bar>xxx</bar></bean>, but using Annotations it's only deserializing as <bean>beanIdentifier</bean>, rest is lost.

Unfortunately I don't have time nor resources to dig into the tuplizer and fix that :-( so I'll use something like Castor and skip the whole XML export functions of Hibernate.

thanks anyway