From what i understand

You have an arraylist that contains items that can be chosen by users.You will save the chosen items to database . Then you need to get the users who selected some item like "windows phone" for example

First of all you need to assign an id for different users to distinguish them.

Store the details in database with userid

for example

 ==============================
 userid | chosen items
 ==============================
  1      | windows  ios android  
  2      | android ios
  ===============================

Then you need to search in the database ( assuming mysql or sql like ) for the specific items (value1,value2) . You can use "LIKE" or "IN" operator

you can use SQL IN operator to search multiple absolute values:

SELECT userid FROM tablename WHERE name IN ( 'Value1', 'Value2', ... );

If you want to use LIKE you will need to use OR instead:

SELECT userid FROM tablename WHERE name LIKE '%Value1' OR name LIKE '%Value2'; Using AND (as you tried) requires ALL conditions to be true, using OR requires at least one to be true.

Here you will get the list of userid and hence users who have chooses specific items value1,value2

for Hibernate

You can use Native sql queries or create query . But search feature is best implemented by Hibernate search query DSL

Easy way would be to use query

Query query = session.createQuery("SELECT u FROM UserData u WHERE u.userRole IN (:roles)");
query.setParameterList("roles", roles);

more info in the link below

http://w3facility.org/question/jpa-get-all-rows-that-matches-multiple-strings/

Better,Correct, but advanced way could be to use Hibernate Search query DSL

You can search multiple keywords on multiple fields with this

Basic syntax

Query luceneQuery = queryBuilder
    .keyword()
      .wildcard()
    .onField("foo")
    .matching("bar*")
    .createQuery();

More info

http://hibernate.org/search/documentation/getting-started/