I have a parent/child relationship where I want to use a criteria query to find results based on attributes within the children. Then I want to return the matching parents with their children filtered to only the matching children. Is this possible?

So let's say the child class that has an attribute of hairColor. I want to search for parent objects where they have children with brown hair and return those parents with the children collection filtered to only have children with brown hair.

I have no problem creating the criteria query to narrow the parent objects to ones with children with brown hair, but I don't know how to filter the children collection. I have searched the docs and read about filtering, but it appears to require a query and not a criteria. Is it possible to create a filter using a criteria?

Thanks for the help.

BTW - I am using Hibernate 2.1.4.

- James

One thing you could do is map children to be lazy, then while your session is open, return your children collection, then filter this collection (which does work on a lazy collection), then call Hibernate.initialize on the resulting child collection.

Best,
Toastchee
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