JPA Query Expressions (JPQL / Criteria)

Query expressions are the foundations on which JPQL and criteria queries are built.

Every query consists of clauses - SELECT, FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING and ORDER BY, and each clause consists of JPQL / Criteria query expressions.

Atomic Expressions

The atomic query expressions are:

• JPQL / Criteria Variables
• JPQL / Criteria Parameters
• JPQL / Criteria Literals

Every query expression consists of at least one atomic component. More complex query expressions are built by combining atomic expressions with operators and functions.

Operators and Functions

JPQL / Criteria queries support the following operators (in order of decreasing precedence):

• Navigation operator (.)
• Arithmetic operators:
  * (multiplication), / (division), + (addition) and - (subtraction).
• Comparison operators:
  =, <>, <, <=,>, >=, IS [NOT] NULL, [NOT] BETWEEN,
  including Collection operators: [NOT] IN, IS [NOT] EMPTY, [NOT] MEMBER [OF]
  and the [NOT] LIKE operator.
• Logical operators: AND, OR, NOT.

In addition, JPA queries support predefined functions, which are also described in this section.

Organization of this Section

This section contains the following pages:

• Literals in JPQL and Criteria Queries
• Paths and Types in JPQL and Criteria API
• Numbers in JPQL and Criteria Queries
• Strings in JPQL and Criteria Queries
• Date and Time in JPQL and Criteria Queries
• Collections in JPQL and Criteria Queries
• Comparison in JPQL and Criteria API
• Logical Operators in JPQL and Criteria API

Detailed explanations on how to build criteria query expressions are provided as follows:

• Literals and Dates (literal, nullLiteral, currentDate, ...).
• Paths, navigation and types (get, type).
• Arithmetic expressions (sum, diff, prod, quot, mod, abs, neg, sqrt).
• String expressions (like, length, locate, lower, upper, concat, substring, ...).
• Data expressions (currentDate, currentTime, currentTimestamp).
• Collection expressions (isEmpty, isNotEmpty, isMember, isNotMember, size).
• Comparison expressions (equal, notEqual, gt, ge, lt, le, between, isNull, ...)
• Logical expressions (and, or, not, isTrue).