Hibernate count collection size without initializing

Question

Is there a way I can count the size of an associated collection without initializing?

e.g.

Select count(p.children) from Parent p

(

Answer 1

A possible solution other than queries might be mapping children with lazy="extra" (in XML notation). This way, you can fetch the Parent with whatever query you need, then call parent.getChildren().size() without loading the whole collection (only a SELECT COUNT type query is executed).

With annotations, it would be

@OneToMany
@org.hibernate.annotations.LazyCollection(
org.hibernate.annotations.LazyCollectionOption.EXTRA
)
private Set children = new HashSet();

Update: Quote from Java Persistence with Hibernate, ch. 13.1.3:

A proxy is initialized if you call any method that is not the identifier getter method, a collection is initialized if you start iterating through its elements or if you call any of the collection-management operations, such as size() and contains(). Hibernate provides an additional setting that is mostly useful for large collections; they can be mapped as extra lazy. [...]

[Mapped as above,] the collection is no longer initialized if you call size(), contains(), or isEmpty() — the database is queried to retrieve the necessary information. If it’s a Map or a List, the operations containsKey() and get() also query the database directly.

So with an entity mapped as above, you can then do

Parent p = // execute query to load desired parent
// due to lazy loading, at this point p.children is a proxy object
int count = p.getChildren().size(); // the collection is not loaded, only its size