Hi,

Is there a way to force the implicit use of "left outer joins" in scalar queries?

For example, if I have this query:

"select cat, cat.mate.name from DomesticCat cat"

the result set won't contain cats that do not have mates.

But what I want is to have null returned as the mate's name,
when the cat doesn't have a mate.
And I want to achieve this WITHOUT using an explicit left join
in the from clause of the query like this:

"select cat, mate.name from DomesticCat cat left join cat.mate as mate"

Is this possible?

Thank you,
Teodor

No. You must use an explicit join if you want an outer join

Are there any special difficulties stopping the implementation of this?

It should be enough information in the mapping file to do implicit outer joins from scalar queries?

I don't see why this would be useful. Plus, it corrupts the well-established semantics of HQL implicit join.

Not going to happen, sorry.

Thanks for your quick reply!

If scalar HQL queries supported implicit outer-joins it would make it simpler for applications for dynamically generate HQL queries. Right now we would need to go down and check the ClassMetadata in order to generate HQL queries with outer joins. The query itself also becomes more complex. Wouldn't it be more consistent if scalar queries also honored the outer-join="true" parameter?