Hibernate version:2.18
Struts 1.1

It appears that the using the struts <html:text/> tag will treat null values as empty strings. So, if a user does not enter a value for a given field, instead of this field being null, it gets set to "".

So, when I try to do something like this

...

First Name: <html:text property="person.firstName"/>
First Name: <html:text property="person.lastName"/>
...

Example personExample = Example.create(Candidate.class)
.enableLike(MatchMode.START)
.ignoreCase()
.excludeZeroes()
.create(sForm.getPerson());

The query that is generated contains ALL properties, not just ones that have had "real" values set.

Is there a way to make QBE ignore empty strings?

Sure, write a PropertySelector

<embarrassed>Works like a charm.</embarrassed>

Thanks,
Dave

I don't think you should be too embarassed. I had the same question and the answer isn't very obvious to someone new to Hibernate. It seems like there should be a easy switch like excludeBlankStrings that would do this for all of your String properties. And unless you have a bit of understanding of how the Example class works, you may not realize that there can be only one property selector (from what I can tell). So if you write



You're probably not going to get what you expected unless you added the logic from excludeZeroes into your selector.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyway, here's what I came up with for my situation:



It would be nice if there was some way to chain these together so I could say




But that's just me :-)