Hibernate CollectionOfElements EAGER fetch duplicates elements

Question

I stepped into the same problem - when you set the FetchType.EAGER for a @CollectionOfElements, the Hibernate tries to get everything in one shot, i.e. using one single query for each entry of element linked to a "master" object. This problem can be successfully solved at a cost of N+1 query, if you add the @Fetch (FetchMode.SELECT) annotation to your collection. In my case I wanted to have a MediaObject entity with a collection of its metadata items (video codec, audio codec, sizes, etc.). The mapping for a metadataItems collection looks as follows:

@CollectionOfElements (targetElement = String.class, fetch = FetchType.EAGER)
@JoinTable(name = "mo_metadata_item", joinColumns = @JoinColumn(name = "media_object_id"))
@MapKey(columns = @Column(name = "name"))
@Column (name = "value")
@Fetch (FetchMode.SELECT)
private Map<String, String> metadataItems = new HashMap<String, String>();

It's generally not a good idea to enforce eager fetching in the mapping - it's better to specify eager joins in appropriate queries (unless you're 100% sure that under any and all circumstances your object won't make sense / be valid without that collection being populated).

The reason you're getting duplicates is because Hibernate internally joins your root and collection tables. Note that they really are duplicates, e.g. for 2 SynonymMappings with 3 collection elements each you would get 6 results (2x3), 3 copies of each SynonymMapping entity. So the easiest workaround is to wrap results in a Set thereby ensuring they're unique.

I have faced this problem and I solved it using

criteria.setResultTransformer(Criteria.DISTINCT_ROOT_ENTITY);

This clears out the duplicates which are caused by the join made to the child tables.

You could use a SELECT DISTINCT (Hibernate Query Language) clause as follows

SELECT DISTINCT synonym FROM SynonymMapping synonym LEFT JOIN FETCH synonym.values

DISTINCT clause removes duplicate references in Hibernate.

Although both component and value-type collection has its lifecycle bound to the owning entity class, you should declare them in select clause in order to retrieve them. (LEFT JOIN FETCH synonym.values)

ChssPly76's answer is another approach, but does not forget override equals and hashcode method according to Set semantic

regards,