Suppose I have the following classes:

class Foo {
@OneToMany
List<Bar> bars;
}
class Bar {
String s;
}

And I want to write a method like this:

List<Foo> getFoosContainingAny(List<String> keywords)

The purpose here is to retrieve any Foo f such that a Bar b in its list satisfies:

keywords.contains(b.s)

I'm not sure how to express this in HQL, but I suspect it will require some clever combination of an outer join and the "in elements" operator. Any gurus want to take a stab at this?

BTW, this would make a truly evil interview question. Feel free to use, but not on me.

without thinking too deeply, or even trying to test ;)
something like this:




should return a List<Foo> as you want.
see: http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?t=38790

Thanks for the response, it makes sense to me, I just didn't know something like "f join f.bars" would work in HQL. I'll give it a try this weekend, and if it works I'll come back and credit your answer.