Many Hibernate mapping elements accept the node attribute. This let's you specify the name of an XML attribute or element that holds the property or entity data. The format of the node attribute must be one of the following:

For collections and single valued associations, there is an additional embed-xml attribute. If embed-xml="true", the default, the XML tree for the associated entity (or collection of value type) will be embedded directly in the XML tree for the entity that owns the association. Otherwise, if embed-xml="false", then only the referenced identifier value will appear in the XML for single point associations and collections will simply not appear at all.

You should be careful not to leave embed-xml="true" for too many associations, since XML does not deal well with circularity!

<class name="Customer" 
        table="CUSTOMER" 
        node="customer">
        
    <id name="id" 
            column="CUST_ID" 
            node="@id"/>
            
    <map name="accounts" 
            node="." 
            embed-xml="true">
        <key column="CUSTOMER_ID" 
                not-null="true"/>
        <map-key column="SHORT_DESC" 
                node="@short-desc" 
                type="string"/>
        <one-to-many entity-name="Account"
                embed-xml="false" 
                node="account"/>
    </map>
    
    <component name="name" 
            node="name">
        <property name="firstName" 
                node="first-name"/>
        <property name="initial" 
                node="initial"/>
        <property name="lastName" 
                node="last-name"/>
    </component>
    
    ...
    
</class>

in this case, we have decided to embed the collection of account ids, but not the actual account data. The following HQL query:

from Customer c left join fetch c.accounts where c.lastName like :lastName

Would return datasets such as this:

<customer id="123456789">
    <account short-desc="Savings">987632567</account>
    <account short-desc="Credit Card">985612323</account>
    <name>
        <first-name>Gavin</first-name>
        <initial>A</initial>
        <last-name>King</last-name>
    </name>
    ...
</customer>

If you set embed-xml="true" on the <one-to-many> mapping, the data might look more like this:

<customer id="123456789">
    <account id="987632567" short-desc="Savings">
        <customer id="123456789"/>
        <balance>100.29</balance>
    </account>
    <account id="985612323" short-desc="Credit Card">
        <customer id="123456789"/>
        <balance>-2370.34</balance>
    </account>
    <name>
        <first-name>Gavin</first-name>
        <initial>A</initial>
        <last-name>King</last-name>
    </name>
    ...
</customer>