Question

Is there a Hibernate configuration (hopefully an annotation on a classes mapped @Column field) that would let me sort a collection of entities associated with the loaded entity by a given column of that entity when a session.load(Entity.class, Id) is called?

For example if I had an EntityA that contained a OneToMany association to an EntityB.

@Entity
public class EntityA {
    @OneToMany(cascade=CascadeType.ALL, fetch=FetchType.LAZY) 
    private Set<EntityB> headlines = new TreeSet<Entity>();

}

I want EntityB to be sorted in the Set that is returned from Hibernate.

Answer 1

session.load() loads a single entity instance. No sorting is involved.

Update (based on question edit):

@OrderBy("column_name") can be used to sort collection elements within entity by given column; however that only makes sense for collections that maintain their order (e.g. List, not Set):

@OneToMany(cascade=CascadeType.ALL, fetch=FetchType.LAZY) 
@OrderBy("name")
private List<EntityB> headlines = new ArrayList<Entity>();