Okay let's say I have parent and it contains a collection called child and child has a String called childName. Is there a way to make a criteria query that will return all parents that have a child with childName='Larry'? How about one that only returns parents that contain both a childName='Larry' and childName='Dave'?

I thank you in advance.

You can use something like this.

Criteria crit = session.createCriteria(Parent.class).createAlias("children", "child").add(Restrictions.like("child.name", "first")).add(Restrictions.like("child.name", "second"));


select
this_.id as id0_1_,
this_.name as name0_1_,
child1_.id as id1_0_,
child1_.name as name1_0_,
child1_.PARENT_ID as PARENT3_1_0_
from
MyParent this_,
MyChild child1_
where
this_.id=child1_.PARENT_ID
and child1_.name like ?
and child1_.name like ?


parent has many children while each child has a parent

Thanks.

That looks like the correct solution for the first case. [ Criteria crit = session.createCriteria(Parent.class).createAlias("children", "child").add(Restrictions.like("child.name", "first")) ] would return parents with a child named "first"

But based on the sql you wrote that doesn't seem to work for the second case. It looks like it would return parents with a child named firstsecond, but it would not return a parent with one child name first and another named second.