I was looking for ways to retrieve the same objects in different ways. Sort of like jboss grouping of fields. Say you group the fields and if one of the fields is accessesd all the values of the the fields in the group are retrieved. I would probably correct if I say lazy fields.

Is there a way to configure hibernate that way?

The use case for it would be the use of summary inside the views. Suppose user provides query criteria and a bunch of objects are instantiated. Those objects might be fairly big (say 100 fields), so I would want only dozen or so fields instantiated in my summary view, when user selects particular object he wants to navigate I would need hibernate to fill up the rest.

Any insight is appreciated.

My understanding is that what you want is not possible with Hibernate. However, you can emulate such behavior by changing your objectmodel... Have an object with the initial fields, and a one-to-one mapping to another object (which cannot be null) that has the other fields (which is lazily loaded). Then you can have the desired result. Otherwise, its all or nothing with primitive fields.