Hibernate version: 1.20

Nearly all of our data access is via HQL rather than the criteria API or by individually loading entities by ID. We also have requirements to add criteria programatically to an HQL based query. Finally, we've made an HQL editor / query analyzer that provides some Intellisense (in particular, it opens completion listboxes for available entity names and applicable property names).

To do all this, we've written our own lame, kludgey, home-brew HQL parser. We'd really like to use NHibernate's internal parser, but when I look at the code, it is written specifically for translating HQL to SQL. Specifically, it parses HQL and modifies a QueryTranslator object. This QueryTranslator contains information on how to build the SQL, but not information about the structure of the original HQL. What we need is a parser that builds a DOM of the HQL query. That way, the DOM could be consumed for a variety of different purposes, SQL generation being only one of them.

Is anyone else interested in getting a DOM from HQL text? If someone can work with me on this enhancement (someone more familiar than me with parsers and state machines) I'm confident that we could make it available in the next NHibernate release.

The requested DOM could be an extension of the Criteria API ...

Ayende Rahien suggested what is probably the best approach, in this post, to get an Abstract Syntax Tree:

http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=967914

A JIRA issue has been created. If you are interested in getting an HQL parser that generates an Abstract Syntax Tree, please vote for it ...

http://jira.nhibernate.org/browse/NH-1051