@Elementcollection Java persistence (hibernate) causes duplicate instances to be loaded

When @ elementcollection is used, multiple instances of all objects being loaded are loaded More specifically, it is loading an instance for each element in collectionofstrings

For example, a database with a single instance of MyClass is similar to collectofstrings Size() = = 4, the call to load all MyClass values will return a list of size 4 (all the same objects), instead of only 1 object

Is there a clean and simple way to solve this or expected behavior?

// Parent class is a @MappedSuperclass which may or may not be relevant to the issue
@Entity
public class MyClass extends ParentClass {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
    private long id;

    @ElementCollection(fetch=FetchType.EAGER)
    @IndexColumn(name="indexColumn")
    private List<String> collectionOfStrings;

    // other instance variables,constructors,getters,setters,toString,hashcode and equals
}

public class MyClassDAO_Hibernate extends GenericHibernateDAO<MyClass,Long> implements MyClassDAO {

    @Override
    public List<MyClass> loadAll() {
        List<MyClass> entityList = null;
        Session session = getSession();
        Transaction trans = session.beginTransaction();
        entityList = findByCriteria(session);
        trans.commit();
        return entityList;
    }

}

protected List<T> findByCriteria(Session session,Criterion... criterion) {
    Criteria crit = session.createCriteria(getPersistentClass());
    for (Criterion c : criterion) {
        crit.add(c);
    }
    return crit.list();
}

MyClassDAO myClassDAO = new MyClassDAO_Hibernate(); // in reality,implementation type is determined with a Factory
...
List<MyClass> myClassInstances = myClassDAO.loadAll();

Thank you, heavye

Edit: add findbycriteria call

Solution

I don't know if this is an error or legal behavior, but it can be done by applying distinct_ ROOT_ Entity result variable to fix:

protected List<T> findByCriteria(Session session,Criterion... criterion) {
    Criteria crit = session.createCriteria(getPersistentClass());
    for (Criterion c : criterion) {
        crit.add(c);
    }
    crit.setResultTransformer(Criteria.DISTINCT_ROOT_ENTITY);
    return crit.list();
}