title: (Lazy) LEFT OUTER JOIN using the Hibernate Criteria API
body: <p>I want to perform a LEFT OUTER JOIN between two tables using the Criteria API. All I could find in the Hibernate documentation is this method:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Criteria criteria = this.crudService
              .initializeCriteria(Applicant.class)
              .setFetchMode("products", FetchMode.JOIN)
              .createAlias("products", "product");
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, this either performs an inner join or a right outer join, because of the number of results it returns.</p>
  
  <p>I also want my join to be Lazy. How can I do this?</p>
  
  <p>Cheers!</p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE:</strong> It seems that using aliases makes the join INNER JOIN automatically. There is something in the "background story" I have not grasped yet. So, no alias today. This leaves me with the problem of applying restrictions to the two tables, because they both have a column (or property, if this is more appropriate) '<em>name</em>'.</p>