We've built up a filter library on top of OpenJPA CriteronQuery is fairly dynamic allowing population of a number of parameters and currently returns the associated Entity objects correctly.
For a large majority of the web service calls however, the entity association as well as the additional overhead retrievals are un-necessary as we're directly populating the data into a DTO and returning it. The DTOs do not always map to the Entity objects being returned. I've been able to modify the library to correctly populate a shallow (No List<OtherClass> etc) pojo DTO by making use of an array of Selection<> objects. I'd like to support the ability to populate fields of child memebers. Eg, given: ParentDTO { List<ChildDTO> childDTO; // associated set/getChildDTO, addChildDTO } ChildDTO { Integer id; String firstName; String lastName; String city } I'm not sure how to define the individual elements of the ChildDTO? Should the child be mapped in the parent as a CompundSelection<>{ Selection<Integer> idPath, Selection<String> firstName } in the parent selection list? Would this return me v List<Object[]> result set an array of the corresponding child fields? The construct() method looks interesting but I've been unable to see how I can bend it to my will. Is it tied to an entity object or can I map it to individual POJO's and only for certain elements while handling child objects selectively also? Thanks, -- ------------------------------------------- Craig Taylor ctalk...@ctalkobt.net