We are attempting to integrate with a presentation layer technology that works exceptionally well with result sets and, to a lesser degree, XML documents.

Is there a way given a hibernate collection to return the collection as a JDBC result set?

An alternative solution would be to serialize the collection and its contents; however, that is percieved to be less desirable.

Has anyone in the hibernate community experience with these two approaches? What reccomendations/caveats/guidelines would you give?

If you work with tabular data throughout your application, why use an object/relational mapping tool at all? Use plain Java/JDBC/SQL or one of the trivial JDBC frameworks.

Good angle, but unfortunately does not address the questions.

The short answer - we have an application framework build on hibernate that we must integrate with the presentation technology (another app). The application framework includes a query builder on top of HQL as well as a good deal of development that supports business rules, etc - the app framwork is used by a number of other apps.

No, you'll have to write this yourself. Your case is really special.

i dont know what great presentation layer you are refeerring to, but systems like jasper reports (and other reporting) has an abstraction that is easily implemented on top of a standard java object/collection....if the only "interface" is a resultset, then write a resultset implementation that delegates to a collection/object[].

Thank you for your responses - and I think that you have addressed the JDBC aspect.

To restate - there is no capability within hibernate to return a result set representing a collection of objects. Which I sort of figured after poking around in the javadoc, forums, etc, but I wanted to be certain.

I do agree that the result case is *special* - and certainly not within mainstream hibernate. The delegation approach may work - but I have to mull that option over.

No one addressed the XML approach however. There are a number of candidate technologies that provide various approaches / options for java object serialization including java XMLEncoding ..... Any suggestions / experiences?

The presentation technology in question is cold fusion MX and Flex. Although I do not believe that I used the adjective 'great' in desrcibing it, it is a powerful analog to other presentation markup. There have been several posts regarding cf - none of them have been answered/addressed.