Consider the relationship Parent to Child.

The Parent has many children, each with different hair color.

I want to load a Parent object and its contained Child objects using the hair color as the criteria.

so... What I should end up with is a loaded Parent object and its contained Child objects where the Child object has hair color of "brown".

Another way to understand the result set I'm looking for is to read the sql below, it gives me the correct parents and children based on my criteria.

select
p.*, c.*
from
parent p,
child c
where
p.id = c.id and
c.hair_color = 'brown'

With NHibernate, I am able to load the correct parent object based on the child criteria, however, when I ask for the children collection from the parent, it returns all the children associated with the parent, when I really just want the one I asked for.

Thoughts?

That's just the way it works. parent.Children always means all its children, no matter where you got the parent from.

how can I load the objects I want with out going back to the database? Is there a way to do it on one shot?

If the Child object has a Parent reference, you could just return the child object(s) that match the hair color. The child would bring the parent along with it.

i have a similar situation.. i was able to do the following (loosely translated to your situation)

"from parent p inner join fetch p.children as child where child.haircolor = "brown" "

something like that works for me..

Do you mind sharing some code on how to you solve this problem?
NHibernate document is not complete therefore it is hard for newbie like to me to get speed on the tool.

I'm not quite sure what code you are looking for. the hql I posted works for me. :roll:

Tell me how I can help you.

Couldn't you just add custom filter to set/bag definitions? (just like the one in table). I think this will be useful.

I have the same problem but my scenario when i try to use ICriteria.

I can solve this problem using mapping xml mapping in collection but it's not dynamically:

<bag name="SurveyAnswers" inverse="true" lazy="true" cascade="all-delete-orphan" where="bIsOptionAnswer!=1">
<key column="nSurveyQuestionId" />
<one-to-many class="Survey.Core.Domain.SurveyAnswer, Survey.Core"/>
</bag>