Hibernate version: 3.1

The find-by-example facility is extremely useful, especially when hibernate is paired with Spring to perform automatic binding of form fields to Object properties, and then wrapping these objects in Hibernate Examples to perform queries for persistent objects.

Why doesn't hibernate's Example facility currently support associated objects?

Will hibernate's Example facility ever support associated objects?

Note: It is stated in hibernate_reference.pdf Section 15.6 "Example queries" that "Version properties, identifiers and associations are ignored. By default, null valued properties are excluded."