I am working on a master/detail workflow for a Struts app, and am using an "open session in view" pattern. On the detail screen, I pass a Hibernate object into the request, then use taglibs to display all the object attributes. Watching the generated SQL, I notice that when I lazily init the collections, Hibernate brings back the complete record for each object in the collection, even though I'm only displaying a single string attribute. I gather that lazy initializing a collection is an all-or-nothing operation. Is there some way to only pull back a single attribute from a collection? Could <element column> help here? The docs are generally great but don't really describe what element columns are for, so I'm puzzled.

As usual, any hints would be much appreciated:) Hibernate rocks!

You might want to have a look at the "Lightweight" pattern described in the patterns section of the site. It is meant to handle these situations. The basic idea is to have two different objects mapped to the same table. One is simply a "lightweight" subset of the data; the other the full mapping. This is especially OK if that table is always persisted through the top-level entity (i.e., not part of a cascade).