NHibernate 1.2
SQL Server 2005
.Net 3.5


I've got an M:N relationship and I'm querying the child associations via a ICriteria using FechMode.Eager.

The SQL being generated is doing an inner join on the associative table and then doing an left outer join on the child table. Needless to say, if there are no elements in the associative table with the parent id then the parent is not included in the results.

This is not the behavior I want. I've tried using FechMode.Join but the behavior is the same and I've read they're actually aliases for each other so that makes sense.

Is there a way to do this using the ICriteria API or will I have to resort to HQL?

Edit: I should also mention that the M:N relationship is being mapped as an IList<T>

Now I'm confused. I switched to using HQL via LEFT OUTER JOIN and it's returning null.

I just want to pull all of object A out of the table, and if they have children, pull those children out as well and do it all in 1 go. If they don't have children, I still want them but with an empty list for the child list.

How do I accomplish this?

Well I've answered my own question :)

CreateCriteria("parent.children", "child", NHibernate.SqlCommand.JoinType.LeftOuterJoin)

works as expected. If anyone can tell me why this isn't the default behavior, I'd love to know.