Hi all,

Suppose you have a HQL query like this

with a complex and dynamic where clause, and also a dynamic select clause, I mean, in some situations I must do a call to a db function in the select clause.

Now, the question is: how would you do this with Criteria API? The problem is the dynamic call to the db function.

A call to a db function would be implemented with a projection. But if I use a projection I loose the properties of the root entity.

When I do

hibernate automatically expands all properties of the root entity. How do I combine this with projections?

It would be nice to have

instead of

and hibernate would combine the properties of the root entity with the projection.

What do you say?

Thanks in advance!
Rui Baeta

Hello, again

Thinking again, maybe a better way would be to have a special projection, say "RootEntityProjection", that mimics the behavior of "entity.*", i.e., it would automatically expand all properties of the specified entity.

This way, we could combine RootEntityProjection with SQLProjection, something like this:

I'm using alias-based ResultTransformer, so we must use aliases like property names, but you could enhance implicit org.hibernate.criterion.CriteriaSpecification#PROJECTION to take care of this.

And, of course, I am assuming we have a transient property declared in the entity to receive the dbFunction() result.

This behavior seems pretty much like when we use the @Formula annotation, except that in many situations, we want that to be dynamic, i.e., we don't always want to call the same database function or some times we don't want to call any database function at all. Additionally, a database function may have parameters and @Formula doesn't allow variables, only constants.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks,
Rui Baeta