Hello.

I have Company and Tool entities.

Every tool belongs to exactly one company (there is COMPANY_ID field in the TOOL table).

Company.hbm.xml has

<set name="tools" inverse="true">
<key column="COMPANY_ID"/>
<one-to-many class="eg.Tool"/>
</set>

and Tool.hbm.xml has

<many-to-one name="company" column="COMPANY_ID" not-null="true" />

The problem is: when I load tool by its ID, I'm not interested in its "parent" company. But Hibernate uses join to fetch everything. If I set outer-join attribute of many-to-one to "false", everything works fine but I can not access tool.getCompany().getName() in the case I need it.

Is there a way to disable join for particular relationship while be still able to access parent object later?

I think there is a part about lazy initialization. Try setting lazy=true

it might be just for Collection, I am very new to this also

Why not? Are you getting an error? If so, what is the error? How about showing the mapping for Company and Tool? And a simple code snippet showing what you are trying?

I do this all over my code and it works fine.

2pritpal : no, "lazy" is not valid attribute for <many-to-one>

2steve: oops. Copying code snipets I have found the error. Totally my fault. My peoblem was NullPointerException accessing .getName() and as I have found, I was working with tool actually having COMPANY_ID=NULL. So Hibernate was right returning null from getCompany().

sorry.