Hibernate version:
3.0.1
Name and version of the database you are using:
SQL Server 2000 sp3

I've read through the documentation many times and now also have several books on the subject just to fill things out. My question is this as I've not seen it addressed anywhere just yet:

I have a number of tables which are essentially lists of Things, and quite often, all I need to do is drop the collection of Things into a Velocity template for rendering in order for some poor soul to make a selection in a web page somewhere. Now... using the mapping files, I have options to cache maps, lists, bags, etc... but, all the documentation related to M2M or O2M mapings are of other objects within the Thing type(s).

The question is... do I have a way through session.get() or session.load() [which would let me use a cached collection] to only access the basic collections or do I always have to use session.list() which seems to not ever get cached?

It seems to me that session.get(Thing.class, 0) or whatever identifier will retrieve that object and it's related maps, when all I need is a collection of Things.

Thoughts?

I tend to access collections in one of two ways:

1. Create a <set> or <list> with a <one-to-many> association
2. Use session.createCriteria( Object.class ).add( ... ).list( )

The latter can be cached (I believe) by calling setCacheable( true ) like so:

session.createCriteria( Object.class ).setCacheable( true ).add( ... ).list( );

However, I think it's only cached for the precise query that is executed (if you don't have any filter expressions then that's a non-issue). To simply load the list of all things in a given table:

session.createCriteria( Thing.class ).setCacheable( true ).list( );

Should do it and cache the results. Criteria queries also have the trait of loading objects with implicit fetch semantics, meaning outer-joins are used to load many-one and one-one associations (where allowed), which I find very useful.

- Jesse