I know for Query you can get the underlying HQL, but it looks like Criteria and Query are completely different, they dont interact with each other, i am wondering if it is possible to get the underlying HQL/SQL of a Criteria.

I guess yes. I seem to remember that hibernate in fact translates Criteria queries into HQL, then translated to SQL. But I didn't look how to retrieve this HQL query if I'm right.

it is a very stubborn folklore that criteria translates to HQL. Criteria goes directly to SQL, but there is no direct public api to get it programmatically.

Perfect :-). Now I know it for good. Thanks for reestablishing the truth max :).

Well, at least, it did seem quite logical for me : I thought it'd have been a way of reusing the already done work on HQL to implement Criteria in addition.

translating twice isn't very efficient ;)

anyhow there is actually work being done to share some of the translation but that is more about sharing the underlying code than the actual language.

Totally agreed :). But programming is often finding the right balance between performance and maintainability, which is also often opposites.

Perfect :).

Cheers

I have modified the Hibernate Criteria API to generate JPQL queries by trying to preserve the interface mostly similar. Name of my project is Criteria2JPQL at:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/criteria2jpql/

Since this translation is a simple in-memory operation that generates a standard JPQL query, there is not a considerable cost of time. On the other hand, the idea of this project has originated from the poor performing native sql queries of Hibernate Critera including lots of unnecessary joins. We have experienced using Criteria2JPQL in our project at my company and observed those unnecessary joins disappeared.