I'm trying to figure out the Hibernate way of querying a list of entities that may contain an entity within it. Since that's probably confusing i'll just explain the situation more clearly.

I have an Entity A class which has a OneToMany relationship with Entity B. Now given a specific Entity B I want to be able to find all Entity A objects which contain the Entity B object in their list.

In SQL this would look like:

or


So what would the JPA/HQL equivalent look like? Or should I use something else?

Thanks for any help!

Wouldn't that be something like

from EntitiyA as a left join a.children as b where b = :referenceEntityB

I haven't tested it, but i believe this one will create an outer join which again
will return the elements that has B in it.

If you want the EntityA to come back with its children collection initialised, add "fetch" after "left join":

from EntitiyA as a left join fetch a.children as b where b = :referenceEntityB