Dear All,
I would like not to load some attribute when I load an object (a kind of lazy mode but for attributes) : is it possible and how can I do ?

I haven't tried this but I'm guessing that you could map the attribute as a one-to-one relationship (perhaps even to the same table) and that the DB would only be hit when you reference the 'related' object. (remembering to set outer join to false on the relationship)

You could also use a class hierarchy (inheritance) and loading the type corresponding to the level of detail you need.

Example:
CustomerInfo: containing customer's name and id
Customer extends CustomerInfo: with link to ordered items

When loading your customer, choose to load CustomerInfo or Customer depending on what you need...

See the "lightweight class" pattern on the Wiki.

Wiki ????????????????????

Ok thanks but it is a little bit heavy to handle, it should be a good idea to add some attributes in the XML mapping to allow not to load some attributes of an object

This is not possible to implement w/o buildtime bytecode tricks.

And anyway it is a horribly inefficient thing to do, most of the time - it exposes you to n+1 selects problem whenever you do actually need the extra attributes.